#BOU2026 – Keynote abstracts
Birds and people: challenges and opportunities of coexistence
31 March – 2 April 2026
University of Nottingham, UK & Zoom & Bluesky
Alfred Newton Lecture
The natural history of a human-bird mutualism
Claire Spottiswoode
FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Co-Director of the Max Planck–UCT Centre for Behaviour and Coevolution
Cooperation between humans and wild animals is vanishingly rare. Yet Greater Honeyguides (Indicator indicator) are African birds whose lives have been interwoven with our own, to mutual benefit, for probably as long as we’ve been human. This is because they seek out humans and lead us to an exceptional source of energy for both us and them: honeyguides know where bees’ nests are located and eat beeswax, whereas we humans have unique abilities to use smoke and tools to subdue the bees and open their nest, exposing wax for the honeyguides and honey for ourselves. During a cooperative honey-hunt, honeyguides signal to humans using a distinctive guiding call, and in return people signal to honeyguides using specialised honey-hunting calls that vary culturally across Africa. Over the last decade, we have studied this mosaic of entwined species and cultures in collaboration with honey-hunting communities in Mozambique, Zambia and elsewhere in Africa. In this talk, I will share some of our findings together on how the honeyguide-human partnership functions, how it may have shaped and continue to shape the ecosystems we evolved in, and what it might be able to teach us about communication and the coevolution of cultures across species.
Claire Spottiswoode is a South African evolutionary ecologist, studying birds in Africa. She has been hooked on natural history since childhood, and is especially fascinated by species interactions. Her two main areas of research, together with her team, are coevolution between brood-parasitic birds and their hosts, and mutualism between honeyguides and the human honey-hunters with whom they cooperate to gain access to bees’ nests. Both projects rely on close cooperation with communities in Zambia and Mozambique. Claire works at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where she is also Co-Director of the Max Planck–University of Cape Town Centre for Behaviour and Coevolution. She is also Honorary Professor of African Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Keynotes
Is the British love of birds what has made citizen science so great and so problematic?
Caren Cooper
North Carolina State University, USA
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
Understanding how disturbance affects birds is crucial to their conservation
Will Cresswell
University of St Andrews, UK
Disturbance makes the ecological world go round. The ecological consequences of disturbance, and the magnitude of these are very similar to non-lethal, but profoundly important effects of predation and interference competition. I will show examples of how bird populations are affected by the starvation-predation risk trade-off and by competition, and how these are exactly analogous to disturbance. How avoidance, whether of predators, competition or disturbance creates cascading ecological effects, and how humans create profound disturbances, often unintentionally. As human populations massively increase, the effects of disturbance on bird populations and their conservation, may then completely trump any other considerations, such as habitat and climate change. Bird species that can behaviourally adapt or evolve to ignore human disturbance end up as winners, and this process can happen very rapidly. Bird communities and species abundance may now be primarily determined by human disturbance in many areas of the world. However, for those species that cannot adapt to human disturbance, or that are affected lethally by humans (i.e. by hunting or other dangers associated with humans or their environments) understanding the consequences of disturbance, and then management of this disturbance is crucial for their conservation. Giving species the time and space to avoid humans, through human behavioural and cultural change, may be as key to many bird population’s survival, as more traditional conservation approaches.
Will Cresswell has been watching animals and birds in the field for as long as he can remember. Research interests since 1989 include predator-prey behavioural interactions, interference competition, how non-lethal effects of predation risk structure avian communities, life history traits of tropical birds, migration and dispersal, and the conservation of birds in agricultural and other anthropogenic habitats. Will has had a NERC and Royal Society University Research Fellowship, was the Lecturer in Ornithology at the Edward Grey Institute and moved to St Andrews University in 2003 where he is currently a Professor of Biology.
Getting a wellbeing boost from birds
Zoe Davies
University of Kent, UK
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
Ethno-ornithology: science and society in dialogue
Andrew Gosler
University of Oxford, UK
“Some writers have objected to the name of Hedge-Sparrow for this species… ..Yet a name which Shakespear has put into the mouth of one of his fools is hardly to be dropped, even at the bidding of the wisest, so long as the English tongue lasts.. .. It may be easy in some cases to change a name which has been only used in technical works, ..but the attempt to meddle with a word which is part and parcel of our language and literature is a very different thing.” So wrote the BOU’s founder, Alfred Newton of Accentor (now Prunella) modularis in 1871. Indeed, the folk-name Dunnock was chosen for its taxonomic neutrality. Newton was clear on the importance of culture in shaping human perceptions of birds, from their naming to how scientific discourse about them is framed. This lecture focuses on how British ornithology, which through its Empire influenced the world, developed through the interaction of two cultures: a popular class-based society deeply engaged with the natural world, for whom thousands of local bird folk-names were known and used by all social classes; and a scientific culture with a strong desire to find and understand order, patterns and processes, in nature. Influenced by the work of Charles Darwin and others, a growing and highly educated (male) middle class focused on birds (female focus was directed towards botany) drove this integration. The legacy of this foundation is influential still, and relevant to addressing the nature disconnect of contemporary post-industrial societies.
The origins, dispersal and evolutionary history of chickens
Greger Larson
University of Oxford, UK
There are approximately 80 billion chickens on Earth which makes them by far the most numerous domestic animal. Despite their ubiquity, there has been little consensus regarding the timing or location or circumstances of their domestication. We are continuing to explore when, where, and how chickens first became associated with human societies, what happened next, how their close proximity to people drove the evolution of Marek’s disease, a highly contagious viral neoplastic disease, and how chickens evolved to disperse into higher latitudes. Here, I’ll discuss a critical assessment of chicken remains described in >600 sites in 89 countries, alongside an evaluation of zoogeographic, morphological, osteometric, stratigraphic, contextual, iconographic, and textual data. I’ll also present studies predicated on direct radiocarbon dating of >20 ancient European chickens and an ancient genomic analysis of the selection pressures on chickens as they dispersed into Western Eurasia. Lastly, I’ll discuss how an ancient DNA approach to Marek’s virus is revealing new insights into the human-mediated selection of the increased virulence of this deadly disease.
Greger Larson received his bachelor’s degree in 1996 from Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts college in California. He read just about everything Stephen J Gould ever wrote over the following three years while he wandered the deserts of Turkmenistan and worked for an environmental consultancy in Azerbaijan. Deciding that evolution was cooler than oil, Greger studied at Oxford and the University of Colorado before receiving his PhD in Zoology in 2006. He then spent two years in Uppsala, Sweden on an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship before starting a job in the department of archaeology at Durham University. Greger then moved to Oxford University to become the Director of the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network Greger where he is continuing his focus on the use of ancient DNA to study the pattern and process of domestication. He rarely wonders what his salary would be had he stuck to oil.
Who gets to see urban birds? Environmental inequality in African cities
Chevonne Reynolds
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
I thought I was studying birds, but it turns out I was studying privilege. We spend millions counting birds, but we rarely ask who gets to see them? Cities function as strong socio-ecological filters that create winners and losers among both birds and people. These filters create inequalities in access to urban nature, but we still struggle with clear solutions to address them.
As urban populations grow globally, access to urban nature becomes increasingly important for human wellbeing. African cities are at the epicenter of this challenge, expanding faster than anywhere else while supporting exceptional bird diversity alongside extreme inequality. Birds provide an ideal lens for examining urban environmental inequality because they respond sensitively to urban change and are charismatic and well-liked.
Our research on birds across African cities demonstrates the complexity of this challenge. While cities generally support lower bird species richness than rural areas, within cities wealthy neighborhoods consistently support greater bird diversity than poorer areas. However, these disparities extend beyond species counts into ecosystem services. For example, community surveys revealed which bird species people find most appealing. When these preferences are mapped against actual distributions, wealthy communities consistently have greater access to culturally valued species. In short, socioeconomic status determines not just which birds people encounter, but their qualitative experiences of urban nature.
Our research exposes how environmental injustice is embedded in our cities. These patterns are complex, they matter for human wellbeing, and they need urgent attention. The challenge remains how do we create cities where both people and nature can thrive?
Chevonne Reynolds is an Associate Professor, landscape ecologist and ornithologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She completed her PhD on waterbird ecological function and postdoc on land use change and bird communities at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. Since joining Wits in 2018, she has focused more on urban systems—how could you not when living in this mega-city? Her research extensively uses citizen science and open data to understand socio-ecological dynamics in African cities.
Houghton Trust Keynote Speaker
Complex interplay between birds, humans and the environment for modern disease threats
Ian Brown
The Pirbright Institute, UK
Ian provides disease consultancy internationally and nationally to a wide range of stakeholders primarily on avian influenza. As a birder the natural link between disease and birds is something he has closely studied in his career. His specific research interests include epidemiology, vaccination, pathogenicity, transmission and infection dynamics in relation to the control of influenza in animal hosts including zoonotic threat. Ian holds a visiting Professorship position in Avian Virology at the University of Nottingham.
xxxxx
xxxxx
The Houghton Trust Keynote Lecture is kindly sponsored by The Houghton Trust, promoting research into avian diseases. Read more about The Houghton Trust here.
Scientific Programme Committee
Nishant Kumar | Ambedkar University Delhi & National Centre for Biological Sciences (TIFR), Bengaluru, India & University of Oxford, UK (Chair)
Tatsuya Amano | University of Queensland, Australia
Kristina Beck | Senckenberg Research Institute, Germany
Joelene Hughes | RSPB, UK & BOU Meetings Committee
Barry McMahon | University College Dublin, Ireland & BOU Meetings Committee
Alice Risely | University of Salford, UK & BOU Meetings Committee
Umesh Srinivasan | Indian Institute of Science, India