A major focus of Susie’s current research is the use of mechanistic approaches to understand the potential vulnerability of different bird species to climate change. She supervises both Carrie and Kyle, guiding their research on Southern Ground-Hornbills, particularly in relation to this critical issue. Additionally, she collaborates closely with Andrew McKechnie on projects that integrate behavioral and physiological approaches to better understand the thermal biology of birds. Susie is a New Zealander and completed her undergraduate degrees in Ecology & Biodiversity and Classical Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and her Ph.D. on tactile sensory systems in birds at Massey University. She moved to South Africa in 2010 and spent her first field season in the Kalahari over the summer of 2010/11. The focus of Susie’s and her students’ field work is on the relationship between thermal biology and behavioural ecology, in particular the fitness consequences of behavioural thermoregulation.

For more information about Claire’s research, please visit www.africancuckoos.com for information on research on brood parasite-host coevolution in Zambia, and www.africanhoneyguides.com for information on research on honeyguide-human mutualism in Mozambique. Beyond her main focus on coevolution, Claire has wide interests in ornithology, and has also worked on cooperative breeding, life history evolution, nest camouflage, sexual selection, and bird migration, as well as the conservation ecology of threatened species in eastern Africa. She has been thrilled to get to know the ecology of Southern Ground-Hornbills, whose dawn booming is always a highlight of fieldwork. She represents the Southern Ground Hornbill project on the academic staff of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at UCT, and co-supervised Kyle Middleton’s PhD research together with Dr Rita Covas and Dr Fanny Ryback.

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.