Our paper “Chase-away evolution maintains imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite–host system despite rapid evolution of mimics” has been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Our paper “Repeatable randomness, invariant properties, and the design of biological signatures of identity” has been published in the journal Evolution.

Tanmay’s PhD, entitled “Signatures and forgeries: optimality in a coevolutionary arms race” was awarded with no corrections. Huge thanks to collaborators and colleagues who were instrumental to this work, and to examiners James Herbert-Read and Graeme Ruxton. Tanmay will remain on the team and continue conducting fieldwork in Choma as part of the Junior Research fellowship that he is starting at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Our paper “When perfection isn’t enough: host egg signatures are an effective defence against high-fidelity African cuckoo mimicry” has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The Society for the Study of Evolution has awarded Jess Lund an R. C. Lewontin Graduate Research Excellence Grant, which will enable her to expand her investigations into the fascinating lives of honeyguides. This grant is awarded to students early in their PhD programmes to assist them in enhancing the scope of their research. Thank you to the SSE for their generous support of our work!

Tanmay Dixit will again be a member of a team organising and lecturing in the Evolutionary Biology Crash Course 2023.

Stephanie McClelland’s paper entitled “Eggshell composition and surface properties of avian brood-parasitic species compared with non-parasitic species” has been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. This study measured structural properties of the eggshells of brood parasites and their hosts around the world. The study found that…

Dr Gabriel Jamie is currently visiting the Evolutionsbiologisk centrum (EBC) at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he is collaborating with Professor Per Alström. On Wednesday 17 May he gave a research seminar to the department on research into mimicry, speciation and polymorphism in Africa's...

We are excited that Yinka Abayomi has joined our team at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town. Yinka is a new MasterCard Foundation Scholar, and will be carrying out his MSc research on the occurrence and determinants of pre-rain green-up and its association with the timing of breeding in birds in Zambia’s miombo woodlands, working with Chima and Claire. He joins us from the Federal University of Abeokuta, Nigeria, and brings to the team his expertise in forestry, and an enthusiastic and growing interest in ornithology, and particularly in how climate change affects the timing of annual cycle events in birds.

Our paper “Combined measures of mimetic fidelity explain imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite-host system” has just been published in the journal Biology Letters. This study was led by Tanmay Dixit, and carried out together with Gary Choi, Salem al-Mosleh, Jess Lund, Jolyon Troscianko, Collins Moya, L Mahadevan, and Claire Spottiswoode, as part of a collaboration between our group and Prof. Mahadevan and his lab at Harvard University. Together we combined mathematical tools and field experiments in Zambia to quantify a key difference – “squiggle” markings – between the eggs of hosts (tawny-flanked prinias) and parasites (cuckoo finches). We showed that suboptimal behaviour on the part of prinias allows cuckoo finches to get by with an imperfect copy of prinia eggs.

Dr Gabriel Jamie and Professor Claire Spottiswoode of the African Cuckoos team, together with Professor Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, have just finished teaching an Honours (4th-year undergraduate) module on "Fundamentals of Scientific Research" at University of Cape Town. The module explores the...

Our paper “Aggressive hosts are undeterred by a cuckoo’s hawk mimicry, but probably make good foster parents” has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In the paper, we investigate the costs and benefits to the African cuckoo of specializing on a highly aggressive host species, the fork-tailed drongo.

The African Cuckoos Team had a fantastic time at the Pan-African Ornithological Congress (PAOC15), this year held in Vic Falls, Zimbabwe. Dr Chima Nwaogu gave a plenary talk on “Differing Priorities in the Timing of Annual Life History Events”, while Professor Claire Spottiswoode and Silky Hamama presented during a roundtable session on communities in conservation and research. Silky also presented a poster, with Claire, Jess Lund, Mairenn Attwood and Cameron Blair each giving research talks as well. 

Dr Gabriel Jamie has just returned from a successful couple of months of fieldwork in Zambia as part of his Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship. For this research, Dr Jamie is exploring the evolution of polymorphisms across diverse avian family Cisticolidae which exhibit some of the most complex and diverse eggs of any group of birds in the world.

Dr Gabriel Jamie and Dr Chima Nwaogu organised a symposium on “The ecology and evolution of moult in tropical birds” as part of the International Ornithological Congress. The symposium included a Round Table discussion as well as invited talks from a range of speakers including Dr Yahkat Barshep (A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute, Nigeria), Dr Barbara Helm (Swiss Ornithological Research Institute, Switzerland), Dr Oluwadunsin Adekola (FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, South Africa & Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria) and Dr Yosef Kiat (University of Haifa, Israel).

Dr Gabriel Jamie was an invited speaker at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology conference in Prague, Czech Republic, as part of the symposium on “Repeated and Parallel Evolution in Adaptive Radiations. Gabriel spoke on “The persistence of polymorphisms across species radiations” building on work conducted together with Dr Joana Meier. To learn more about this research you can read their Trends in Ecology and Evolution paper here.

Tanmay Dixit was a member of a team organising and lecturing in the inaugural Evolutionary Biology Crash Course. This course, aimed at undergraduate or early-postgraduate students, teaches evolutionary principles to students who have had limited opportunities to be exposed to evolutionary ideas. The course is funded by the Equal Opportunities Initiative Fund of the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). Tanmay presented lectures on behavioural ecology and evolution, focussing on kin selection, coevolution, and parasitism. Over 700 students, with the vast majority from the global South, attended the course, which was a resounding success!

Our paper “Visual complexity of egg patterns predicts egg rejection according to Weber’s Law” has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This research was led by Tanmay Dixit, and carried out together with Andrei Apostol, Kuan-Chi Chen, Tony Fulford, Chris Town and Claire Spottiswoode, in a collaboration between biologists and computer scientists. We used machine learning to compute a biologically-relevant measure of egg pattern complexity, and combined this with field experiments in Zambia to investigate how complexity evolves in an arms race between host egg signatures (by tawny-flanked prinias) and parasitic egg forgeries (by cuckoo finches).

Dr Gabriel Jamie is continuing his fieldwork on the evolution of polymorphisms in cisticolas and prinias in Nigeria, where he is also a teaching fellow at the AP Leventis Ornithological Research Institute (APLORI). The image shows the 2022 APLORI MSc class during the Global Birding Big Day on 14 May. The team recorded 135 species while walking around the nature reserve surrounding the institute.

Our paper “Genetic architecture facilitates then constrains adaptation in a host-parasite coevolutionary arms race” has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In it, we address the long-standing puzzle of how exquisite mimicry of the eggs of several different host species can evolve within a single species of brood-parasitic bird. We show that in cuckoo finches in Zambia, egg mimicry of different host egg phenotypes is maternally inherited, which allows mothers to transmit host-specific adaptations to their daughters irrespective of which host species the father was raised by. This study was a team effort from colleagues at the University of Cambridge and University of Cape Town (Claire Spottiswoode, Wenfei Tong, Gabriel Jamie), at Boston University (Katherine Stryjewski, Jeff DaCosta, Evan Kuras and Michael Sorenson) and in the Choma community in Zambia (Ailsa Green, Silky Hamama, Ian Taylor and Collins Moya).

A fruitful 2022 rainy season of fieldwork is underway! Gabriel Jamie, Maggie Mwale, Cameron Blair and Jonah Walker travelled to Choma in February to reunite with Collins Moya, Silky Hamama, and all our Zambian colleagues, to carry on the wet-season projects which were cut short by Covid in 2020,...

A local Cambridge Brownie group (girls aged 7-10) spent a session with Mairenn Attwood, learning all about African cuckoos. Alongside discovering the tricks used by brood parasites, the Brownies also had a go at creating their own egg spoons. In the field, these are used to reach eggs in nests...

Cameron Blair and Jonah Walker have joined the African Cuckoos team! Cameron previously did his BSc(Hons) project on the development of the guiding call of the greater honeyguide with the African Honeyguides team, and he has just started his MSc at the University of Cape Town, looking at how...

Tanmay Dixit has received a Rosemary Grant Award (2021), an award which contributes to research costs for PhD students towards the latter part of their PhD. This will allow him to enhance his dissertation work by conducting more fieldwork on the coevolution of egg patterns in cuckoo finches and...

The Dry Season team is back into the swing of things! Dr Chima Nwaogu began data collection for his fellowship project on breeding phenology, focusing on tchagras and dark-capped bulbuls in addition to historical egg collection records from the Choma area. Collins Moya and Silky Hamama are taking...

Claire Spottiswoode and Jess Lund from the African Cuckoos team are collaborating on a new project tracking the movements of bronze-winged coursers. Together with Bart Kempenaers, Eunbi Kwon, and Mihai Valcu (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology), as well as fire ecologist Sally Archibald...

Stephanie McClelland’s paper entitled “Embryo movement is more frequent in avian brood parasites than birds with parental reproductive strategies” has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  Stephanie measured embryonic movement of brood parasites and their hosts at sites all over...

Dr Gabriel Jamie has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship based at University of Cambridge. For the fellowship Gabriel will build on his previous work on brood parasitism and the evolution of polymorphisms to understand the incredible diversity of egg patterns and colours found across...

Our paper ‘Why and how to apply Weber’s Law to coevolution and mimicry’ has been published in the journal Evolution. This perspectives paper, written by Tanmay Dixit, Eleanor Caves, Claire Spottiswoode, and Nicholas Horrocks, argues that Weber’s Law of proportional processing can lead to otherwise counterintuitive predictions about the evolutionary trajectories of mimicry systems.  Weber’s Law states that when the magnitude of a stimulus is large, it is more difficult to discriminate a change or difference from that stimulus. In other words, relative differences are more salient than absolute differences. We show that Weber’s Law could have implications for mimicry: when stimulus magnitudes are high, it should be more difficult to discriminate a model from a mimic. This leads to testable predictions about evolutionary trajectories of models and mimics. We also present a framework for testing Weber’s Law and its implications for coevolution. 

Our paper “Hosts elevate either within-clutch consistency or between-clutch distinctiveness of egg phenotypes in defence against brood parasites” has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. In this study, led by Eleanor Caves, we asked how host eggs evolve adaptations that allow them better to discriminate their own eggs from parasitic eggs. Theoretically, hosts can generate their own individually-distinctive egg ‘signatures’ by laying eggs that appear similar to one another (consistency) but look very different from other individuals’ eggs (distinctiveness). In this new study, we show that host species of two African brood parasites deploy either consistency or distinctiveness, but not both, as defences, and achieve distinctiveness by combining egg colours and patterns in unpredictable combinations.

Congratulations to Mairenn Attwood for being awarded the Janet Moore Prize for teaching in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, for her outstanding tutorial supervision of final-year undergraduate students, who praised her breadth and depth of knowledge, enthusiasm, and friendliness.  Mairenn follows in the footsteps of Tanmay Dixit who was awarded the Janet Moore Prize in 2020. Well done both for inspiring the next generation of behavioural ecologists!

Dr Gabriel Jamie gave a webinar titled: “Africa’s Avian Cheats: Exploring the deceitful ways of cuckoos, honeyguides and parasitic finches”. The talk was part of BirdLife South Africa’s Conservation Conversation series and explores the amazing world of brood-parasitic birds in Africa. You can watch a recording of the talk here:  https://youtu.be/7fesIIK2_Wk

Our African Cuckoos research team have just finished running a two-week online workshop on “Research Skills in Ecology & Evolution” for over 30 participants consisting of graduate students and staff at Copperbelt University and Livingstone Museum in Zambia. The course was also attended by participants from the College of African Wildlife Management in Mweka, Tanzania.

Congratulations to Dr Chima Nwaogu for his award of a British Ecological Society “Ecologists in Africa” grant to start his new programme of research in Zambia entitled “Why do Afrotropical birds breed when they do?”, based at the FitzPatrick Institute of Ornithology at the University of Cape Town. Thank you to the BES for this wonderful support!

Dr. Gabriel Jamie has been awarded the Society for the Study of Evolution Presidents' Award for Outstanding Dissertation Paper in the journal Evolution, for his paper, “Multimodal mimicry of hosts in a radiation of parasitic finches,” Evolution (2020) 74: 2526-2538. In this paper, Dr. Gabriel...

Jess’s MSc entitled “Coevolutionary causes and consequences of high-fidelity mimicry by a specialist brood parasite” was awarded with distinction. A massive thank you to the field team which made this work possible, the research group for all their discussion and assistance, and the two examiners...

During this year’s British Science Week, we’ve been engaging with local school children in Cambridgeshire. Mairenn Attwood led interactive talks at the Thomas Clarkson Academy in Wisbech,  a school partnered with ‘Teach First’ (a charity aimed at reducing educational inequality).

Our paper “Limits to host colonization and speciation in a radiation of parasitic finches” has just been published in the journal Behavioral Ecology. In this study, led by Dr Gabriel Jamie, we explored the factors which limited the colonisation of new hosts by brood-parasitic Vidua finches. Speciation in these birds is closely connected with the colonisation of new hosts. Therefore, if we can understand what limits this process, we can understand what has limited the diversification of this radiation.

The amazing mimicry shown by nestling Pin-tailed Whydahs of their Common Waxbill hosts is showcased in David Attenborough’s Life in Colour the latest natural history documentary on BBC One. Filming of this sequence by Nick Green and Max Hug Williams of Humble Bee Films took place at our field site in Choma, Zambia, with Dr Gabriel Jamie acting as scientific consultant and contributing sound recordings.

You can watch the sequence in Episode 2: “Hiding in Colour” on BBC iPlayer.

Dr Gabriel Jamie has written a popular article on parasitism, mimicry and speciation in the parasitic finches of Africa for the magazine African Birdlife. You can read the article open access via the FitzPatrick Institute for African Ornithology website.

We’re delighted that the amazing diversity of estrildid finch chick phenotypes, many of which are mimicked by their indigobird and whydah brood parasites, was featured on the front cover of the November issue of Evolution.
As well as featuring our paper “Multimodal mimicry of hosts in a radiation of parasitic finches“, the issue also contains an insightful ‘Digest’ piece on our research by Renan Janke Bosque, Jente Ottenburghs, Cecília Rodrigues Vieira and Fabrícius Maia Chaves Bicalho Domingos. You can read it here: “The interplay between imprinting, mimicry, and multimodal signaling can lead to sympatric speciation“).

Mairenn Attwood successfully passed her MPhil viva at the University of Cambridge, defending her thesis entitled “Angry birds: does it pay a cuckoo to parasitise a highly aggressive host?”, and Luke McClean successfully passed his PhD at the University of Cape Town entitled “Coevolution between brood-parasitic honeyguides and their hosts”. Congratulations Mairenn, congratulations Dr McClean! Thank you to all five thesis examiners for their insights, and to the field team that enabled both research projects. Mairenn will return to Cambridge and Zambia in 2021 to start her PhD on further fascinating aspects of fork-tailed drongos’ defences against their enemies.

Dr Gabriel Jamie gave a talk on mimicry in the parasitic finches of Africa at Birdlife South Africa’s Virtual African Birdfair. Please also see Dr Jessica van der Wal’s talk on our sister research project on honeyguide-human mutualism (more information at www.AfricanHoneyguides.com) and many other great research talks by our colleagues at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. Also visit the amazing line-up of other talks at the Virtual African BirdFair, including a talk on bird art by the brilliant Faansie Peacock who has generously allowed us to use his illustrations in several of our scientific publications. Thank you BirdLife South Africa!

Congratulations to Mairenn Attwood for successfully submitting her MPhil thesis at the University of Cambridge, entitled ‘Angry birds: does it pay a cuckoo to parasitise a highly aggressive host?’. In it, Mairenn asks whether high levels of aggression by fork-tailed drongos affect hawk mimicry by the African cuckoo, and whether it pays cuckoos to specialise on such aggressive hosts. An amazing feat of field experimental work in Zambia (in collaboration with Jess Lund), analysis and writing in just one year of research – well done Mairenn!

Dr Gabriel Jamie and Dr Joana Meier’s paper on the persistence of polymorphisms across species radiations is on the front cover of the September issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The cover image provides a specific example of the trans-species polymorphisms that the paper explores. Here, a polymorphism in shell chirality that recurs across multiple species of Amphidromus snails . Photos by Menno & Jan Schilthuizen. You can read the full article here: https://tinyurl.com/ycgdw4lu

In a new paper published in Evolution, Dr Gabriel Jamie along with Silky Hamama, Collins Moya and Prof. Claire Spottiswoode from the African Cuckoos team and collaborators from University of Puerto Rico (Steven Van Belleghem), Princeton University (Dr Cassie Stoddard and Dr Ben Hogan) and University of Cambridge (Professor Rebecca Kilner) provide evidence of host-specific mimicry in the indigobirds and whydahs of Africa. Building on the pioneering work of Robert Payne and Jürgen Nicolai, they provide quantitative evidence that nestling Vidua finches mimic the patterns, colours and begging calls of their host’s nestling, and qualitative evidence of mimicry of host movements.

Dr Gabriel Jamie and Dr Joana Meier’s paper “The Persistence of Polymorphisms across Species Radiations” has been selected by Trends in Ecology and Evolution as the journal Editor’s pick of the month. Read the full paper here: https://tinyurl.com/y29l4ygr

Honeyguiding.me is a citizen science project for which we welcome all records of Greater Honeyguides anywhere in Africa. Visit our Honeyguiding.me project site in English, en français & em Português!
Please also follow the Honeyguide Research Project on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram @honeyguiding.

Now live: a new website for our sister project at AfricanHoneyguides, sharing our research on the remarkable cooperative relationship between Greater Honeyguides and human honey-hunters (for information on the darker side of Greater Honeyguides, as brood parasites of other birds, see the Honeyguides page on this website).
A big thank you to Hennie Botha of Dumel Web Design, South Africa, for his beautiful design of both the AfricanHoneyguides and AfricanCuckoos websites.

In a new paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Dr Gabriel Jamie and Dr Joana Meier explore the phenomenon that the same polymorphisms often recur in many members of a species radiation (e.g. colour/pattern morphs, heterostyly, mating types, shell chirality). This phenomenon is puzzling because...

In a new paper in Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology, Dr Gabriel Jamie, Dr Samuel Jones, Emidio Sumbane and Merlijn Jocque present the results of a three-week expedition to three poorly-known mountains in northern Mozambique: the Njesi Plateau, Mount Chitagal and Mount Sanga. These mountains...

Despite being truncated by the pandemic, Gabriel Jamie, Tanmay Dixit and Stephanie McClelland spent very successful couple of months in Zambia. A lot of nests were found, many by Sylvester Munkonko, Oliver Kashembe and Oscar Siankwasya, above, allowing Tanmay and Steph to collect very useful data. Gabriel successfully collected genetic samples that will be used to construct the reference genome of the Tawny-flanked Prinia. Gabriel also acted as scientific consultant for a BBC film crew making a documentary on the amazing indigobirds and whydahs at the field site. The crew were successfully able to get the desired footage and are hoping the film will come out in 2021. Watch this space!

Congratulations to Luke McClean on submitting his PhD thesis at the University of Cape Town, entitled ‘Coevolution between brood-parasitic honeyguides and their hosts’, based on four years of fieldwork in Zambia from 2015 to 2018 – here he is setting up a nest camera in the field together with...

The end of another productive field season! Mairenn Attwood and Jess Lund spent the past three months conducting experiments investigating how fork-tailed drongos defend themselves against parasitism by African cuckoos. Mairenn focused on drongo aggression as a defence, while Jess looked at their...

Gabriel Jamie had an excellent visit to our collaborators Dr Moses Chibesa, Dr Ngawo Namukonde and Stanford Siachoono at Copperbelt University in Kitwe. Gabriel met with researchers and students in the Department of Zoology and Aquatic Sciences in the School of Natural Resources to discuss future...

We are delighted to welcome Mairenn Attwood to our team, as she commences an MPhil at the University of Cambridge. Mairenn will be studying the curious resemblance of African cuckoos to Accipiter hawks, by presenting models at the nests of Fork-tailed drongos.

Members of the research team from the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town meet up in Cape Town for an intense few days of planning our next research steps, accompanied by plenty of winter birdwatching and botanising. Here Jess, Tanmay, Luke, Claire and Mairenn attempt (with the...

Congratulations to Dr Gabriel Jamie for his award of a post-doctoral research associate position at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

A successful season of fieldwork has seen the collection of more genetic samples from Tawny-flanked prinias by Gabriel Jamie, as well as egg rejection experiments conducted by Tanmay Dixit. Jess Lund continued experiments on the colouration of Cuckoo finch chicks, started in 2018 by Jana Riederer....

‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’ is a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, co-edited by Claire together with Steve Portugal, Ros Gloag and Rose Thorogood – read on for 16 papers on some of the most fascinating animals you’ll...

Jess Lund has joined the team as an MSc student at the University of Cape Town. She is currently assisting with several projects in Zambia this wet season but will return to Cape Town soon to begin. Her project will focus on the coevolutionary consequences of host egg signatures in the fork-tailed...

Tanmay Dixit and Claire Spottiswoode visited collaborators in the USA as part of developing questions for Tanmay’s PhD. Prof L. Mahadevan (Harvard University) and Dr Mary Caswell (Cassie) Stoddard (Princeton University) and their groups made them feel very welcome, and the thought-provoking and...

Tanmay Dixit has commenced his PhD research on egg mimicry in the Cuckoo Finch and egg rejection behaviour by their hosts (family Cisticolidae). He plans to use approaches from applied mathematics, visual ecology and psychology to understand how hosts recognise eggs, and the implications for this...

Begging calls provide nestling brood parasites with a powerful and flexible tool for avoiding rejection, altering parental provisioning and competing with host nestmates. Despite much research into the topic, no synthesis of parasite vocal strategies for host manipulation has yet been made. In a...

An enjoyable wet season has seen Gabriel Jamie collect genetic samples and egg phenotype data for our project examining the genetics of egg appearance. Tanmay Dixit and Jana Riederer conducted fieldwork in Zambia for the first time, studying egg rejection, Cuckoo finch colouration, and host...

Thanks to the wonderful support of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, we are starting a new project on the evolution and ecology of the mutualistic relationship between honeyguides and human honey-hunters, working mainly in Mozambique, as well as Zambia, Tanzania, and elsewhere. New...

Brood-parasitic birds lay eggs that mimic those of other species, to trick hosts into incubating their egg and raising their chick. Hosts often fight back by evolving egg colours and patterns that look different from those of their parasites, making an impostor easier to spot. In this study, we...

Mimicry is responsible for some of the most striking adaptations found in nature. It occurs across a huge diversity of taxonomic groups and exploits all manner of sensory systems – from sight to sound to smell. Classic examples of mimicry include the close visual resemblance between the eggs of...

The lives of migratory birds breeding in Europe and wintering in Africa south of the Sahara are governed by environmental conditions experienced thousands of kilometres apart. In this paper, Marjorie Sorensen cleverly measured isotopes and hormones deposited in growing feathers to track the...

The BBC Radio 4 series "Natural Histories" is featuring honeyguides on 18 October (11h00 BST; repeat on 24 October at 21h00). On the programme, Claire Spottiswoode talks about our research on the Jekyll-and-Hyde lives of these intriguing birds – their brutal life as brood parasites of other birds...

In Mozambique, we've been studying the other side of honeyguide's lives: honeyguides are not only brutal brood parasites of other birds, but also the cooperative partners of human honey-hunters. In collaboration the Niassa Carnivore Project, we show that Yao honey-hunters in the Niassa National...

Africa's vegetation is changing fast, owing to climate change and other results of human activities. How does this affect the distributions of interacting species such as brood parasites and their hosts? In this paper using data from the South African Bird Atlas Project, we show that parasites...

Luke McClean has been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship to carry out MSc research on coevolutionary interactions between lesser honeyguides and their hosts in Zambia, based at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town. Luke is a graduate...

The streaky-breasted flufftail is a highly enigmatic and skulking tiny migratory rail species that lives in the flooded grassy 'dambos' of our Zambian study area. In a new article, Gabriel Jamie and our chief field assistants Collins Moya and Lazaro Hamusikili describe for the first time its...

Our Greater Honeyguides killing their Little Bee-eater hosts star in the 'Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks' episode of BBC Natural History Unit's "World's Sneakiest Animals" TV series, presented by Chris Packham. The first broadcast is at 20h00 on 14 January 2015, on BBC Two. The Natural History Unit...

Host species of brood-parasitic birds can evolve features such as spots, squiggles and colours on their eggs that act like ‘signatures' that are difficult for parasites to forge, helping hosts to detect and reject imposter eggs. In this new paper, we show that hosts of cuckoo finches and diederik...

Being parasitised by a greater honeyguide is very bad news for a host – the young honeyguide stabs the host's young to death with special bill hooks as soon as it hatches (more here). It's therefore puzzling that little bee-eater hosts seem not to recognise and eject honeyguide eggs from their...

Exciting news for us is that our Memorandum of Understanding between Copperbelt University (in Kitwe, Zambia), the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Cape Town (South Africa) was signed by our respective heads of department. This MoU sets out our commitment to continue the very...

Our research in Zambia is enabled by a brilliant team of local nest-finding assistants. Gabriel Jamie, Claire Spottiswoode and Collins Moya gave illustrated talks to share our past brood parasite research findings, and future plans, with them and their families living on our study area. Please see...

We were very happy to welcome Dr Lackson Chama, from the Department of Zoology and Aquatic Sciences at Copperbelt University in Zambia, on a four-day visit to the University of Cape Town. Lackson gave seminars at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute and at Stellenbosch University on his research on the...

Arran Frood from the BBSRC (our main funders) has made a lovely 13 minute video about our joint field research in Zambia and South Africa with Exeter University's Sensory Ecology and Evolution Group on the evolution of egg camouflage, narrated by Jolyon Troscianko: watch it below. Also see...

Coming to the International Society for Behavioral Ecology conference in New York City from July 31st to August 5th? Five of us will be giving talks there about our research in Zambia (and in Claire's case, Mozambique): Marjorie Sorensen on 'Why do migratory birds sing in winter?' Claire...

Why do migratory birds sing on their non-breeding grounds in Africa during the northern winter? It's long been assumed that they are defending individual non-breeding territories, but by means of field experiments and radio-tracking of Willow Warblers in the field in Zambia, PhD student Marjorie...