His doctoral research explored how individuals within breeding ground-hornbill groups contribute to reproduction and territory defence. Currently a postdoctoral fellow under Associate Professor Susie Cunningham and Dr. Rita Covas, Kyle’s research focuses on the deployment of innovative tracking devices to study how ground-hornbills navigate their landscape in such a hot environment, and how high temperatures influence their behaviour and fitness.

In 2019, she earned a BSc Honours degree in Environmental Science from The Open University while working as a field assistant on the Ground Hornbill Project. Currently pursuing a Ph.D.under the guidance of Associate Professor Susan Cunningham and Dr. Rita Covas, Carrie is focused on investigating the effects of high temperatures on behaviour, nestling growth, and physiology in Southern Ground-Hornbills. Her interests lie in environmental science and the multifaceted impacts of climate change, driven by a passion for conservation to ensure the preservation of wildlife and, crucially, their habitats.

She uses birds as study models and strongly believes in the importance of long-term data to address questions about evolution in the wild. Rita became coordinator of the APNR Ground Hornbill project in 2016 and her focus has been understanding the dynamics of group living, how the species social system interacts with their exceptional life-history, and whether cooperation helps Southern Ground-Hornbills to cope with the weather extremes that they experience (and which are increasing under the climate emergency that our planet is facing). Rita runs another long-term project on the Sociable Weaver (at Benfontein Nature Reserve, near Kimberley, South Africa), which also focuses on the evolution and consequences of sociality and cooperation. These projects’ long-term data sets are also used to study how long-term population dynamics is influenced by environmental variation and how this interacts with social behaviour. In addition, Rita has a strong interest in insularity and how species adapt to the island environment, especially on what concerns behavioural adaptations.

Her domain of research expertise is bioacoustics, and works in a team devoted to the study of acoustic communication (Team Acoustic Communications). Her first introduction to the Southern Ground-Hornbills of South Africa came through Kyle in 2017, when she supervised his PhD research and became very fond of these amazing birds. She is particularly interested in within and between-group acoustic communication in the Southern Ground-hornbills, and in charge of supervising all the acoustic research (recordings, analyses, playback experiments).