Joe Morford

The WISDOM OF CROWDS emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds! Excited to share our work published by @aaas.org in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Check out this talk from @dorabiro.bsky.social covering lots of our recent work together!!:)

Check out our new paper Why don't all birds lay early? Causes and consequences of breeding timing for a long-lived migratory seabird It's got the first welsh language abstract in the journal (I think) Thanks to everyone for their field efforts besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Excited to share my second published PhD chapter out now in Current Biology! @cellpress.bsky.social 🧵 below but tldr: birds are known to use the magnetic field to navigate. But is magnetism the whole story? We find that an amazing avian navigator doesn’t seem to rely on magnetic cues at all.

Long-distance navigation is no easy feat, but for some seabirds it can involve traversing hundreds of kilometres of open ocean New research led by @plewin.bsky.social shows that even if Manx shearwaters can sense the earth’s magnetism, they don't rely on it to get home 👇

Day length may impose an ecological constraint on chick provisioning behaviour in a high-latitude #seabird. Read the full #RSOS paper: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... @katrina-siddiqi.bsky.social

Excited to publish the last paper from my PhD which explores how light can constrain chick provisioning behaviour in Manx shearwaters Thanks so much to all my co-authors and to everyone who helped support this manuscript! #seabird #science #research royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Why live with your parents? Golden eagles 𝘤𝘢𝘯 be independent long before they actually 𝘢𝘳𝘦. We tracked juvenile eagle flight in high detail and found that skill didn’t predict when they left home. So what does? 🧵 📝 doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251574 @enourani.bsky.social @safilab.bsky.social

Why do some groups adopt a collective 'many-eyes' approach to vigilance, while in others sentinels keep watch for all? Our paper, led by @charliepilgrim.bsky.social, shows the shape of the cost function determines the optimal strategy. @templetonworld.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our (with @plewin.bsky.social) @currentbiology.bsky.social Dispatches is out today (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...). Covering two recent papers about bird eye movements during flight, using homing pigeons as model species.

Excited to announce that my first paper is out now in @plosone.org! A huge thanks to my co-author @dorabiro.bsky.social. Check out our work on how conventions emerge in human dyads here: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Very excited to present this work tomorrow @isbe2026.bsky.social !!!

Big congrats to @morfjoe.bsky.social on this exciting new paper in Science Advances! We provide evidence that larger flocks of migratory birds navigate more accurately toward their target direction than smaller ones

Really pleased to see this paper out! We show that collective intelligence emerges in wild birds, using radar traces from flocks of migratory hirundines. Many wild social animals might benefit from similar processes, but we could also see Allee effects as migratory populations decline.

Great to see this one published! Worth a read if you’re into the role of collective behaviour in migration 🦅🌍 Very pleased how it came out, glad to be a (very) small part of it.

Check out this work on navigation in shearwaters! These seabirds navigate long distances to forage and migrate, but here we focus on their navigation around their breeding islands, finding that birds could distinguish shorter routes home despite relatively small differences in travel distances!

🥳 New paper alert 🥳 The first of the data chapters from my DPhil, and the works from my first few field seasons on Skomer, is out! "Shearwaters make efficient navigational decisions, even at very fine scales" - doi.org/10.1242/jeb.... A huge thank you to everyone involved 🩵

Can chimpanzees prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities individually or collectively? Check out our new paper in Phil Trans @royalsociety.org, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social, and funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social! And stay tuned for the next paper, clarifying the mechanism!

Check out our new paper on logical reasoning in chimpanzees, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social!!

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

New theme issue of #PhilTransB: The evolution of collective intelligence. Read #OA: buff.ly/f0gWUxH

Intelligent agents can still take irrational actions and, sometimes, groups of animals are better at making good decisions than their constituent individuals. Read the latest article from the TWCF-funded project, “Rationality and Reason beyond the Individual“ project below.

Does being in a collective buffer against individual forgetting, when it comes to navigation? New paper by Joe Morford: we find that collectives of homing pigeons remember their routes better than individuals @dorabiro.bsky.social @richardpmann.bsky.social Thanks to @templetonworld.bsky.social !

Collective wisdom emerges in pigeons through forgetting randomly-different information over time doi.org/10.1038/s415...

You’ve probably heard of collective intelligence but what about collective memory? 🧠🐘 New paper in press, led by Joe Morford! We investigated whether collective decision making in pigeons can rescue long-term memory of learned homing routes 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...