The last few weeks has seen quite a bit of activity, although its not been reflected in this blog. The main work has been that we have employed two field assistants to collect the remaining data from Wytham Woods. These data have been coming in and we are hopeful that a model can be run in the later part of this year. There was some problem with a datalogger, which I couldn’t get to work properly but after much grumbling and bad temper eventually succumbed and is now fine.The two field assistants - Stephen Lang and Andrea Mason are excellent. Two new PhD students also joined the group - Nana Li and Liu Yu, they will be working on swallows. The current plan is for them to spend some time working with Becca Safran in Colorado before conducting some experiments in the UK. Their main work will be to do experimental work on swallows in China - the first time anything has been done there. Aris and I submitted the evolution of breeding seasons manuscript to Proc R Soc which got out to review successfully and fingers are crossed. The philosophy of models article is progressing slowly - this time my fault, I has a revelation about an aspect of the paper which meant that some of it needed to be re-written. The revelation was brought about by some comments received from the brilliant Kate Lessells that made me realise that so called strategic models can only rarely - if ever - exist.
