I'm a behavioural and sensory ecologist interested in avian movement and navigation. My current work focuses on visual attention during flight in homing pigeons and aims to reveal how they extract information from the visual scene to guide their flight over a range of spatial scales. This will involve using head-mounted cameras or inertial motion sensors to estimate pigeons’ gaze direction during obstacle avoidance over metres in the lab and homing over kilometres. In the lab, we’ll manipulate the visual environment to investigate visual attention mechanisms experimentally, whilst we’ll exploit landscape-scale changes to the visual scene as a result of housing and renewable energy development to facilitate a before-after control-impact study of the visual landmarks pigeons attend to during homing. This will also yield insight into the impacts of landscape change on avian movement through navigational mechanisms.
behaviour, ecology, ornithology, physiology
