Robert Leslie Thomson

Associate Professor, FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, University of Cape Town
Robert has a broad interest in bird ecology, but is especially interested in between-species interactions. He comes from Pretoria, and grew up birding and ringing in the bushveld areas. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Pretoria, studying mixed species bird flocks for his BSc Hons. These studies led to him being a field assistant in northern Finland. This stint became his MSc thesis at the University of Oulu, which tested the heterospecific attraction hypothesis that migrant songbirds attract to resident songbirds during their habitat selection decisions. He continued with his PhD in Oulu, further investigating the positive associations in Boreal bird communities, but incorporating the interplay of negative, predation and competition, interactions. He defended his thesis in 2006, and moved to southern Finland to take up a post-doc position at the University of Turku investigating various aspects of raptors and their impact on songbird community structure.

During the avian influenza (AI) crises in 2007, Robert led AI surveillance efforts in Cambodia for the Wildlife Conservation Society, and assisted with surveillance work in Mongolia. He then returned to Finland where he held a series of research fellowships investigating avian habitat selection decisions in the face of ‘enemies’ and the life history of endangered wader populations in the Bothnian bay.

Robert has also initiated three new research projects in the last few years that use unique study systems to answer questions of interest. He has been working on:

1) The importance of Sociable Weaver colonies in the Kalahari and their use by other avian species and other taxa. Investigating how these communities and their interactions change at weaver nests across aridity gradients. This work has also focused on the African Pygmy Falcon, an obligate user of these weaver nests, and their life history and interactions with their weaver hosts.

2) Understanding front-line defences in brood parasite – host interactions. For these studies he is using the redstart-common cuckoo system, unique because the redstart is the only known cavity nesting host of the common cuckoo, that present interesting challenges for the cuckoo.

3) An applied project to understand the role of farmers in vulture conservation in southern Africa. Taking interdisciplinary approaches to understand the factors that affect the use of poison by farmers and human-wildlife conflicts. And focusing on the role that supplementary feeding efforts by farmers can play, and assessing the services that vultures may provide in terms of carcass.