George Hodgson

Golden eagle on the nest in Finland (by O. Karlin)

🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

Three trays of oilseed-rape(OSR) plants The plants in the tray on the right are looking a lot healthier and larger than the other two.

The Rothamsted Research site entrance, with a brick sign in front of a large tree and red-brick building.

Already one month into my placement at Rothamsted Research and learning more and more about chemical ecology every day! 🌱

An image of Jane Goodall and a chimpanzee, from 1965. Photo courtesy CBS Photo Archive / Getty.

The naturalist Jane Goodall died today at 91. Hope, she argued, is not merely “passive wishful thinking” but a “crucial survival trait.” Revisit a conversation with Goodall, from 2021: nyer.cm/F55JtsS

TRAVEL AWARDS - Apply for a travel award to support your trip, accommodation and registration! Application guidelines on www.isbe2026.com

#ISBE2026 Call for Abstracts is now open! Submit your abstract by 15 December 2025 on www.isbe2026.com

@behavecol.bsky.social

Career Development Fellowship | Royal Society This scheme provides the most talented early career scientists from underrepresented groups in STEM with research funding and high-quality training opportunities to build a strong base for a successfu...

Fancy joining us?
Check out this excellent @royalsociety.org Career Development Fellowship:
royalsociety.org/grants/caree...
If you're eligible & are interested in social behaviour, vocal communication or anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, feel free to DM or email me.
@bristolbiosci.bsky.social

It’s the one year anniversary of ISBE2024 in Melbourne, Australia. So many fond memories. And now it’s time to start thinking about the 2026 congress in beautiful Torino, Italy. For further information, follow @isbe2026.bsky.social or visit isbe2026.com.

A small flock of Swifts sweep across a clear blue sky, their slim bodies and crescent wings cutting sharply above the roof of a house. A beloved summer sight - and one at risk of disappearing if protections for nature are lost.

The tree you climbed as a child. Gone. The Swifts over your town. Gone. The air you breathe. Polluted. The river. Unsafe.

This is the reality of deregulation.

Cutting protections would mean disaster for nature & our economy.

Our CEO sets out why: rspb.org.uk/whats-happen... 👈

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds The fish challenge to vertebrate cognitive evolution

Selection Shapes Animal Minds: More completely free videos of talks from our Royal Society Discussion meeting last year. Today's highlighted talk: Dr Zegni Triki (Neuchatel) @zegnitriki.bsky.social @royalsocietypublishing.org @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social youtu.be/WQLjnfhSyD4?...

Image showing Ashley Staab's Masters Defense ad ("Identifying individual-level call variation in the northern bobwhite quail"). Pictures of Ashley holding a male bobwhite quail, a male bobwhite next to a spectrogram of his "bob-white" call, logos for the Hobson Lab and University of Cincinnati, and three example plots from Ashley's work (call spectrograms, a heatmap of call similarity, and a boxplot of within/across individual call similarity.

My grad student Ashley Staab will be defending her Masters work next week! Cute birds ("the bobs"), cool bioacoustics methods (ohun R package call template analysis, machine learning), & fun results (we can identify which bird called!). Let me know if you want a zoom link: Elizabeth.Hobson@uc.edu

White-winged choughs in Canberra, Australia - the bird species studied in the newly published work.

Interested in vocal #communication? How animals provide referential #information about danger? Then see our 🌟NEW🌟 paper by brilliant ANU #PhD student Chun-Chieh Liao out today in @asab.org Animal Behaviour. 🎉👏

#birds #choughs #fieldwork #ECR
With Rob Magrath and Rob Heinsohn
doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

For the #ungulates crowd! 🧪🌍 #wildlife

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

Huntington's disease has been successfully treated for the first time following positive results from a global clinical trial, on which Professor Sarah Tabrizi FRS of UCL's Huntington's Disease Centre was lead scientific advisor:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Three common wall lizards basking next to each other on a stone wall in an urban habitat in Croatia.

📢 City lizards are more social !
Thrilled to share the first paper from my PhD, out now in #BiologyLetters @royalsocietypublishing.org !

We show that urban lizards are more social than their non-urban counterparts 🦎🏙️🌳🧪

doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

@behavecobie.bsky.social

Female capuchins sits on a branch, looking away from the camera. A young capuchin holds onto her back, looking at the camera. Photo: Nick Chapoy

🚨 New paper! 🚨

🐒 White-faced capuchins experience high rates of infanticide.

🐒 Infanticide is costly to female reproduction.

🐒 Do females exhibit the Bruce effect (termination of pregnancy) to reduce these costs?

🐒 Spoiler: Nope!

Read more ▶️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Last month I presented my work on amphibian antipredator behaviour at #Behaviour2025 in Kolkata, India. I met so many cool people and potential future collaborators! Thanks to the organisers for the opportunity to present and to @asab.org and @britishecologicalsociety.org for funding my attendance!

Small metal cow shape on open palm

Women with brown hair and orange vis jacket excavating a small trench in a walled garden

Holy cow, we found a little cow buddy while digging in Great Torrington!
Thanks to all the residents of Castle Street for letting us dig up their beautiful gardens 🐄
#archaeology #cow #greattorrington #excavation @archsengage.bsky.social #publciengagement

🇭🇰 🌀 🌧️

Past 24 hour rainfall map to 10.15am Wednesday September 24th.

Interested in the feral cattle of Hong Kong? @tania-perroux.bsky.social and I will be talking about our PhD research next month; for more information and to register, check out the poster below! 👀🐂☀️

It would signal the the de facto end of nearly all immigration to this country, from those coming to work to those who come for love. It would crater our economy, tear up relationships, remove status from millions of European, result in endless legal battles and leave us as an international pariah.

Reform will apparently pledge today that they'd abolish indefinite leave to remain - including retrospectively, to people already granted it. Obviously this is a moral abomination but it is also a practical and legal impossibility.

A kestrel coming in for a landing on a thin branch

A kestrel perched atop a thin vertical branch

A kestrel preening its tail feathers

A kestrel mid-takeoff from a branch

Kestrel alert!!! 🪶🌿🚨

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

A small bird with a dark blue head, bright yellow-green body, and orange legs perched on a mossy branch.

Green-and-Black Fruiteater near Jardín, Antioquia #Colombia

#birds #nature

Rainbow-like colours in the fur of a tropical rat (Otomys tropicalis)

Super happy to share the first chapter of my PhD, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface ✨🐀 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Iridescence in mammals is not as rare as we thought, but it’s all created in the same way!

3 ceramic wall hangings with illustrations of fish. The top is an oarfish, the middle is two gar with "fish want me" between them, and the bottom is a coelacanth.

fish want me. you want fish. you want fish hanging on your wall

#ceramics drop on sept 21, 8pm CT

First day back at work, and I have a new paper out! authors.elsevier.com/a/1lnmV2gKRh... A review of what we know and the many things we don't know about environmental enrichment for ruminants, with @drmariarorvang.bsky.social and two other lovely colleagues who are not on BlueSky. 🐐🐑🐄

A white Little Egret stands on rocks at the edge of the sea, its wings spread wide as it stretches one long leg forward to step down. The bird looks slightly awkward and dramatic, caught mid-movement. Overlaid text labels the egret as “Me” and the waves it it is stepping into as “That.” The bird’s exaggerated pose look like it’s deliberately, almost gleefully, doing the very thing it was told not to.

Everyone: Don't do that

New in #ProcB - From policy to practice: Progress towards #data- and #code-sharing in ecology and evolution @asanchez-tojar.bsky.social @eivimeycook.bsky.social tell us more in our blog royalsociety.org/blog/2025/09...

We present the first evidence of seasonal coat colour changes in cattle, with paler individuals in the wet season and darker ones in the dry season, suggesting plastic phenotypes. The main driver of seasonal coat colour appears to be thermoregulation, supporting the thermal melanism hypothesis.