​With my fieldwork commitments growing over the past month, it has become much more difficult to invest time into proper birdwatching and wildlife photography trips. But with my taking part in the Patchwork Challenge this year, it's been hard to resist regular checks of the flooded parts of my local Marston patch in the hope of some dropping waders, and twitching the rarer species seen within 10k of my home in Oxford. This has led to a few weeks of terrible photos of interesting birds!!

New OxPods episode is out! Found on our website, Spotify, Google and Apple podcasts.

The survival of offspring is essential for the continuation of species, and yet we see a huge diversity in how much parental care is provided to offspring across the tree of life. So how necessary is it to provide care to your young, and what determines the different strategies employed by differing species?

In this episode of OxPods, I chat to Prof Ashleigh Griffin, who studies why selection favours social behaviour in the context of reproduction.