• Question: Do you study birds?

    Asked by dior101 to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I don’t study birds but I know lots of people who do! At my university there are many people who study seabirds – one of my best friends studies a colony of common terns that nest near Edinburgh. The terns migrate all the way from Africa every year! I have another friend who is on a tiny uninhabited island at the moment, called Mingulay, where he’s studying puffins. A girl in the office beside me goes up to Shetland every year to study skuas, which are enormous, fearsome predatory birds! I don’t know much about birds but I think they’d be very interesting to study – if you have any bird questions I can ask one of my birdy friends to help me answer it 🙂

    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I don’t study brids either, at least not directly. I study a problem that also affects birds, and every now and then I get to read something about birds. In my department we also have a whole group who studies sea birds, and sometimes I envy them for that :). My dad is a bird biologist, and he took me to his field surveys when I was little. I guess this is why I still think birds are really interesting to study. Are you interested in birds then?

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I don’t directly study birds, but a lot of the theoretical work I do on how animals behave in groups relates to bird flocks. For example, the incredible patterns that you see in huge flocks of birds like starlings can be explained with only a few simple rules for how each individual bird behaves:
      1. Avoid collisions with neighbours.
      2. Follow the direction your neighbours are going.
      3. Move closer to your neighbour if you are a bit further away.

      Using these rules you can simulate some quite amazing patterns. The incredible thing is that these simulations then match very closely to the real world patterns that we see in bird flocks. This doesn’t mean this is exactly what the birds are doing – but it does suggest a very convincing explanation.

      There are some good videos here:
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9175000/9175793.stm

      A lot of these ideas about animal group behaviour can be applied to other species as well – e.g. schools of fish.

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Sorry, I don’t know much about birds either! But they are pretty cool – love to be able to fly!!
      I work on plants and cancer cells!

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