Part of my PhD entails evading the English winter by studying cognition in wild New Caledonian Crows, collaborating with Oxford University’s behavioural ecology research group. We aim to build upon the research & findings of previous field seasons, discovering more about the behaviour & ecology of this species which demonstrates such remarkable tool-use. My initial focus will be on wild individuals’ cognitive abilities relating to natural tool-oriented foraging tasks, though as part of the field team I work closely with Dr. Christian Rutz & Lucas Bluff on numerous lines of interest.
When I’m not gallivanting about on a tropical island I’ll be conducting behavioural experiments with captive Parrots here in Birmingham. Where possible I hope to compare the cognitive abilities of Parrots and New Caledonian Crows as distantly related, ‘intelligent’ birds whose behavioural repertoires have been shaped by quite different evolutionary pressures.
Supervised by Dr. Jackie Chappell, I am starting this PhD in 2007 funded by the BBSRC. Before coming to Birmingham I completed a B.A. (hons) in Biological Sciences at Oxford University in 2005, followed by a M.Sc. in Integrative Bioscience in 2006 (BBSRC funded), also at Oxford. My previous research projects have ranged from modelling the visual conspicuousness of woodland bird species to the biomechanics of insect flight and the phylogenetic mapping of an Annelid worm from an EST dataset. In 2006 I joined the Oxford fieldwork team in New Caledonia for 3 months: radio-tracking, “video-tracking”, and trapping the crows amongst other things.
