Damien Farine

Great news! Congrats. It's nice to see the hard work that's been put into the project being recognised.

🚨ABSTRACT SUBMISSION REMINDER🚨

Submissions for the 2026 ASSAB conference are still open until the 13th of March.

Submit now to take part in a friendly, warm and welcoming conference for behavioural ecologists

Wish I could join!

Long-term stability of dominance hierarchies in a wild parrot with fission–fusion dynamics Dominance hierarchies are a common feature of stable groups, allowing animals to limit the costs of fighting over access to resources. However, althou…

It turns out there is order in the apparent cockie chaos!

In a new paper from the Clever Cockie Research Group; @julia-penndorf.bsky.social and co-authors show how roost of wild SC-cockies exhibit linear dominance hierarchies that are stable over 3+ years.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A trio of tawny frogmouths. This pair (here with this year‘s fledgie) have slept in our (their) garden as long as we’ve been here, and I love them to bits ❤️

Congratulations and well deserved!

What a lovely start to the year! Paddled from ANU campus to an island on the lake, had a BBQ in glorious weather, found a dusky woodswallow colony and a washed up ironbark offcut, which @damienfarine.bsky.social has made into a cheeseboard (🧀 for scale).

Counting down our most popular papers of the year.. in at no. 6 is a #BiologyLetters study showing sulphur-crested #cockatoos in Sydney learned to operate public drinking fountains, using their beaks and feet to turn taps and access water: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

With this festive combination of bands we wish everyone a joyful holiday season! Let's all rest up for a refreshed start to 2026! Happy Holidays 🎁

The breeding season is in full swing! After some troubles with currawong predation, most of the groups are on their second or third nest, and all the parents are busy provisioning their young 🦗🐦 30 chicks banded so far! #superbfairywren #SFW_ANU #birds #ecology

Habitat selection during dispersal reduces the energetic cost of transport when making large displacements #ProcB #OpenAccess #Behaviour #Ecology @damienfarine.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

The latest result on dispersal in vulturine guineafowl: dispersing females selectively use roads to reduce the cost of transport when making large displacements.

Out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org Proc B: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Collect giant hail for UQ science digitisation (after the storm)

Thank you so much to everyone who stopped by our posters! Both sessions were very successful and we had some really interesting discussions. Always great to see so much fairywren love 🐦 #AOC2025 #SFW_ANU @sramellini.bsky.social @franhckr.bsky.social

Ella holds a fluffy and sleepy looking toutouwai chick during banding and fits an orange band to its leg

PhD scholarship alert! Are you interested in cognitive evolution? Do you want to know how development influences cognitive traits? Do you love hanging out with birds in the forest? If the answer to these questions is yes, please apply to work with us! 1/2 🧪
www.wgtn.ac.nz/scholarships...

#AOC2025 has started! A great morning including bird walks and an interesting plenary on female colour and song. If you're keen on project updates, attend @sramellini.bsky.social's talk at 14:00 and @franhckr.bsky.social's talk at 14:45 (same session). Also, stop by our posters today and tomorrow!

Machine learning and AI tools will change how we do ecological research. But, there are major barriers to getting high-performing models.

In our latest paper, we argue a need to re-think model performance by integrating it into a hypothesis testing pipeline:

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences In many group-living birds and mammals, the formation of affiliative relationships is hypothesized to cause vocal convergence (an increase in call similarity between individuals). However, testing this causal effect can be difficult, because it requires ...

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Even made the local news! www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG5z...

Back in Kerala to work on our Nat Geo project 🤩

Three's a crowd, so what's four choughs?

This crested pigeon clearly thinks that the bronzewings have gotten too much of the attention.

Someone is taking advantage of me taking too long to fix the roof.

Two wild white-winged choughs in Canberra, Australia; the study species in the newly published paper.

Lead author Chun-Chieh Liao presenting the published work at the Behaviour 2025 conference in Kolkata.

Out 🌟TODAY🌟 in the #new volume of @asab.org #AnimalBehaviour, is latest #PhD chapter from the fantastic #Chun-ChiehLiao:
Functionally referential communication about danger in cooperatively breeding white-winged choughs
#fieldwork #experiments
With #RobMagrath #RobHeinsohn
doi.org/10.1016/j.an...
1/

And paper 2 is now online: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....

NEW PAPER in #ornithology shows that some #raptors switched foraging strategy when #COVID19 lockdowns reduced the availability of #roadkill: buff.ly/jUug7Yj

Dolphin paper link is coming (not yet online ...)

They find neat results. Fishers are more synchronised the longer they spend in the water, the closer they are, and the more cooperative they are (with each other). Yet, heart rate synchrony doesn't translate to fishing success (when dolphins cue)—probably because they have to cast asynchronously. 6/

They then conducted a cross-wavelet power analysis of heart rate variability, which reveals patterns of heart rate synchrony over time and across frequencies. This captures whether synchrony is in phase or anti-phase. 5/

In the second paper, @hanjabrrr.bsky.social and João Valle-Perreira fitted heart rate + GPS sensors to fishers while they fished together with dolphins. This provided simultaneous data on position and heart rate across the line of fishers.

4/