Will Smith

As I'm planning next years field season, I wonder if anyone on here would like to run a small island project on Skúvoy with me. I will be catching and samling great skuas, but there will be good opportunities to investigate other aspects of seabird island ecology 🌍🧪 #seabirds

wonder why they haven't really spread beyond the Chilterns? they seem to be doing well within their current range? But were originally introduced ages ago...(Wikipedia says 1902)

New issue of #BirdStudy
Little Terns nesting in Morocco
Urban Sparrowhawk diet
Urban Blackbird & Robin song shifts
Goosander tracking
Alpine Wheatears
Supplementary feeding of Turtle Doves
Red Kites and wind turbines
Białowieża Robin paternity
www.tandfonline.com/toc/tbis20/c...
#ornithology #birds

Our new paper is out today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (link below). All about eggshell roughness: "Scratching beyond the surface: examining macroecological patterns in avian eggshell texture". Congrats first author Marie Attard, and thank you @leverhulme.ac.uk for the funding.

Contributed to #theBOUblog to share my experiences at the #EOU2025 in Wales this summer!

Final Uist trip *of this year 😅 we will be back in March!

Third and final Uist trip finished! That's 481 individual Rock Doves ringed/recaptured/resighted during 2025, providing great data to help us understand this population. It's been nice to also get the opportunity to update the community on our project progress. @jezierskimt.bsky.social

Big congratulations @rsmehlhausenfranks.bsky.social on passing your viva today with minor corrections. It’s been a pleasure supervising you. Thank you to the examiners @rjpheathcote.bsky.social and @markjfbrown.bsky.social! And thank you Paul Devlin and @evolecollab.bsky.social for your help too!

@sjportugal.bsky.social have you seen? :)

Not yet - but it's on the list for the next year or so. I'm going to do York and maybe Edinburgh first I think...

No, those were just metal ringed! I'll hopefully be back in Orkney at some point over the next 12 months to collect some more samples.

We've been catching lots of Rock Doves in Uist 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 this week. @jezierskimt.bsky.social and I are here for our ongoing monitoring work. Hoping for lots of reports of colour-ringed birds to generate survival + movement data 🤓 🤞@uniofnottingham.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk

Molluscan genome assemblies—problems and progress A reference genome assembly is a starting point for research (Davison & Neiman, 2021) in a wide variety of subdisciplines of biology, including mollusc

Problems and progress in getting molluscan 🐌 genome assemblies, new paper out. Although the publication was much delayed, we recently redid the analysis, finding that actually not much ahs improved 😔 academic.oup.com/mollus/artic...
🧬 & 🖥️ #genomics #snails #molluscs

Congratulations! Very well deserved 🥳

We are still interested in any found twite feathers for a study on the relationships and genetic diversity between the British groups - particularly now for birds of Scottish origin in the NE of England or, birds on the Avon.
DM me for me more info.
#birdringing

Congrats! I am excited to read it :)

Citizen science reveals host‐switching in louse flies and keds (Diptera: Hippoboscidae) during a period of anthropogenic change A study of louse flies in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, and Ireland found 212 different interactions between Hippoboscidae and their hosts, of which 70 were previously unrecorded. No louse flies ...

More Mapping the UK's Flat Flies Project results published today with Adrian Smith & @sheldonbirds.bsky.social 212 host-parasite interactions, including 70 not previously reported, & a recent switch to gulls by some Louse Flies, Hippoboscidae. @btobirds.bsky.social @dipteristsforum.bsky.social

@denisewawman.bsky.social

Congratulations! 🪺🥳

A wide range of abiotic and biotic variables leaves most variation in bird nest architecture unexplained | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Nests are the locations or containers for offspring, and mediate interactions between offspring and the environment. However, understanding how environmental factors shape the evolution of nest archit...

New paper today in Proc B @royalsociety.org. We explored nest architecture in 3,685 species of birds, modelling the multivariate nature of nests, i.e. how shape, location or attachment co-occur. Then we explored how the environment affected nest architecture evolution. Spoilers in the title! 🪺🐦🌍

Interested in island life and arthropods? There's a new PhD project advertised at the University of Birmingham to study the evolution of 'island syndromes' in a chosen group of island arthropods, with both museum and fieldwork-based research are expected. More details at: centa.ac.uk/studentship/...

Homing and feral pigeons differ in hippocampal formation neuron size: a Golgi study - Brain Structure and Function Artificial selection for behavioural traits can significantly affect the anatomy of brain regions related to the behaviour under selection. The homing pigeon (Columba livia) is a prime example of how ...

New paper out today on hippocampus neuron morphology in homing and feral pigeons. 🧵

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#neuroskyence #neuroethology #anatomy

Do you like islands? And/or arthropods? Please get in touch with me (m.t.jezierski[at]bham.ac.uk) or another member of the supervisory team!

We will help you study island evolution in arthropods with a (funded) PhD @unibirmingham.bsky.social. 🪲🏝️🦋

centa.ac.uk/studentship/...

*Please share this!*

Examples of some recent papers from graduate students in my group - a full list of recent papers and preprints can be found here (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=pTdxVdIAAAAJ) and profile of the group here: https://egioxford.web.ox.ac.uk/members

The annual Wytham Field Team Photo!

Celebrating a successful field season with great food & good company - May 2025

Front view of the Life & Mind Building, which opened in Oct 2025: The new home of Biology at Oxford

Interested in a PhD in ornithology? Funding available for projects at the interface of ecology, behaviour & evolution from Oct '26 working on long-term population studies of tits at Wytham, based in @biology.ox.ac.uk in the new Life & Mind Building in Oxford
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

End of 24th yr of intensive Marsh Tit monitoring at Monks Wood. Similar juv recruitment to recent years (<30), half the number when project started. Some deaths of long-lived adults (5-7 yrs old), but our oldest bird survives (10.5 yrs). Crossbills, Siskins, Redpolls, Skylarks overhead. #ornithology

Beginner's luck is a thing, and with a balmy autumn night I was quite excited for my 9th ever moth-trapping night. But Clifden Nonpareil was not on the bingo card! Also, Least Carpet, Pink-barred Sallow and Rosy Rustic. #TeamMoth #leptember #Moths @willjsmith.bsky.social

@sjportugal.bsky.social

A very kind interpretation of a baby pigeon! Here are some wild Rock Dove chicks, who may not be winning beauty contests... 🫠

(nests visited for ongoing @uniofnottingham.bsky.social research in the Outer Hebrides, and for @btobirds.bsky.social @btoscotland.bsky.social #NestRecordScheme)

Please keep an eye out for colour-ringed Rock Doves! :) we catch them all over Uist

🥳New paper out in the Journal of #ornithology

Assignment of wintering Barnacle Geese (Branta leucopsis) to breeding populations using genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A nice collaboration between Wageningen University and NIOO-KNAW. 🤝