Patrick Lewin

Hi everyone 👋 A long overdue first post on here and an introduction to who I am and what I do 🪶 I’m Paddy, a DPhil student researching navigation in birds as part of the OxNav group. You can take a look at the kinds of things we do here: oxnav.org but I’ll tell you a bit more about myself🧵 1/8

A recent commission piece that made my heart sing. It’s deeply rewarding to be able to create something that links an amazing bird with a special place. #manxshearwater #seabird #birdart #birds

Thanks to Jenny, this arrived in the post yesterday and I’m absolutely thrilled! Celebrating Manx shearwaters and featuring @copelandbirdobs.bsky.social on Old Lighthouse Island, where I did my PhD fieldwork studying their navigation. A fantastic bonus to have the compass rose right alongside!

And they’re off! 🪽 Four new pigeon lofts have been opened by The Vice-Chancellor at the John Krebs Field Station, increasing capacity by 200% and supporting a £1m BBSRC project exploring how birds navigate in a changing world.

Great project 💪 with @joewynnbirds.bsky.social @pauldufour80.bsky.social @genmig.bsky.social & many others! We study yellow-browed warblers in Europe: where from, where to, what happens in winter & spring – could a new migration route evolve? 2 birds sampled on Helgoland so far. #birdmigration

The autumn arrival of yellow-browed warblers is pure magic every year. This season we’ve been on Shetland taking genomic samples from these enigmatic birds, in the hope we can link ’reverse’ migration to underlying genomic factors 🧬🗺️ excited to see what we find!

📖 New paper! Early-life environment drives long-term decrease in adult body mass in a wild bird population🌍 🐦‍⬛ 🏔️ 🔎 buff.ly/7Lra4iN

New paper in @animalecology.bsky.social!📝http://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70350 Coordination is thought to be key to the success of biparental care, but we don’t know how this varies with species’ ecology 🍃 We explore: how important is partner coordination & does this depend on environment? 🏞️

Very excited to see this work published, led by Paddy! Have a read here: www.cell.com/current-biol.... Despite recent advances on mechanistic theories of magnetoreception in birds, more work is required to demonstrate how, when and why birds use the magnetic field to navigate in the wild!

I'm looking to hire a postdoc to work on the RepAdapt + MacroMar projects, analysing genomic data from >130 species of plants, animals, and fungi (VCFs are processed, ready to go). Lots of potential for creativity and collaboration! yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...

🚨 PhD position in human, nonhuman primate, and/or dog cognition! I am thrilled to be reviewing applicants this year for a new PhD student to join the Social & Cognitive Origins Group in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins @jhu.edu @jhuartssciences.bsky.social 1/

Lovely work from Paddy! Worth a read if you want to dive into the increasingly complex story of avian magnetoreception 🧭🗺️🐥

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 👇

Please share! I have two positions for graduate students in my lab, starting Fall 2027. Details on the position s and application process can be found here: kjmathot.wordpress.com/opportunities/

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...

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.

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

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

The University of Exeter have announced a programme of academic staff cuts, including all of www.exeter.ac.uk/research/gro... Sign the open letter of support at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... @crab-exeter.bsky.social

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.

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...

Professor Tim Coulson FRS is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a biologist working at the interface of ecology and evolution, developing theory to explore how ecological change influences evolution, and vice versa. #RSFellows https://royalsociety.org/people/timothy-coulson-9070/

Congratulations to Sophus zu Ermgassen, who's been listed on the ENDS Power List 2026! Sophus is listed in the Academics category, with his work mentioned as being highly influential in shaping environmental policy not just domestically, but also globally 👇

First paper, first post 🥳 Many congrats to Liliana Silva and everyone involved! Every behavioural ecologist who’s stared at hours of video footage should check this out 👀 Very proud that the Wytham Tits are part of this!! 🐥🐣 @egioxford.bsky.social

🥳 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 🩵

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.

Join me & @olliepadget.bsky.social at @livuninews.bsky.social! #postdoc #seabird movement & navigation in response to environmental cues @ukri.org. Developing new loggers w/ micro-engineers & computer scientists @yorkuniversity.bsky.social. Job tinyurl.com/2zuzktv5 Press release tinyurl.com/2zuzktv5

Migrated to Bluesky as I'm excited to share our new paper on collective route memories in homing pigeons: rdcu.be/e73Qk We found flocks remembered old routes better than pigeons flying alone, likely because different birds remembered different parts of the route!

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...

Fantastic @egioxford.bsky.social seminar from @pauldufour80.bsky.social on the latest work on avian vagrancy

📑📊We have just uploaded a new pre-print where we decompose spatial, temporal and spatial-temporal variation in natural selection on reproductive traits for great tits and blue tits. With Yimen Araya-Ajoy, @ellafcole.bsky.social and @sheldonbirds.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📄New paper out in Behaviour doi.org/10.1163/1568539X-bja10356 🐦 Ambush behaviour is rarely reported among #seabirds. We observed that #MediterraneanShag might employ this strategy to seize fish schools. Our knowledge on seabird #foragingbehaviour is still lacking! #ornithology

12th RIN Conference on Animal Navigation - one of my favourites 🧭🦉🐟🦇🐝🐜 - this time we tried a new format, inviting topical sessions to make sure we represent the wonderfully broad range of research in #animal #orientation and #navigation and are super excited about the lineup s.gwdg.de/EBROf7

@joewynnbirds.bsky.social did an excellent job on keeping all ducks in a row for the programme juggling and will surely live up to full potential in the legendary pub quiz and other evening highlights - stay tuned!

We have published a new pre-print showing a decline in great tit adult and nestling mass of around 1 gram in 47 y. [rate of approx. -0.040 Hadanes] With @ellafcole.bsky.social, @devisatarkar.bsky.social, Sam. Crofts, @mcmahok.bsky.social & @sheldonbirds.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...