This year I was really pleased to be shortlisted for the British Ecological Society's Elton Prize, awarded for the best research paper in Journal of Animal Ecology written by an early career researcher. As part of this shortlisting, I wrote a blog post for Animal Ecology in Focus outlining the background to our research on age-assortative mating in bird populations - read it here!

Another wonderful trip down to Portland Bird Observatory brought with it a new species for my bird life list - purple sandpiper! There was a small flock of five individuals at Portland Bill. This is a winter visiting species in the UK, and there is still much we do not understand about their migratory movements, though it is thought that many of our wintering birds come from Arctic Canada. I took some photos myself but my colleague David López Idiáquez took these even more impressive ones below!