Cameron Blair

Biography & Research

Cameron Blair

Cameron has been captivated by birds since he was a small child. His love for natural history was solidified growing up in the town of Hoedspruit, South Africa, a stone’s-throw from the famous Kruger National Park, Blyde River Canyon and Mariepskop forest. At the age of 12 he conducted a study on the choice of nesting locations by Red-headed Weavers for the Tritech Interschool Science Fair, and since then he has wanted to study ornithology.

Cameron has been fascinated by the remarkable life history of honeyguides (being both mutualists and brood parasites) since high school, making it the subject of a project for Visual Arts in his final year. He is also fascinated by the ecological consequences of bird calls as inter- and intraspecific signals.

He completed his BSc at the University of Cape Town in Applied Biology, Ecology and Evolution in 2020. In 2021, he completed BSc Honours with the African Honeyguides team at the University of Cape Town (supervised by Claire Spottiswoode and Jessica van der Wal), where he worked on the development of the guiding call of the Greater Honeyguide that functions in this species’ remarkable co-operative mutualism with humans. This work provided evidence that the guiding call develops from the calls honeyguide chicks use to beg for food from their host parents.

Still based at the University of Cape Town, he is now joining the African Cuckoos team for his MSc, looking at how brood-parasitic honeyguide chicks are able to acoustically deceive their host parents to provide them with large amounts of food. He is supervised by Claire Spottiswoode and Jess Lund.

He is passionate about scientific communication and sharing the wonders of the natural world. This has led him to be involved in the University of Cape Town’s Birding Club, chairing the club in 2020 and 2021. He is also the social media manager for Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology, and enjoys sharing developments in African ornithological research across its social media platforms.

News

New paper on imperfect egg mimicry

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.

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New paper on host aggression and hawk mimicry

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.

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African Cuckoos Team at the Pan-African Ornithological Congress

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. 

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