The reintroduction of the Chequered Skipper butterfly to England is one of the outstanding conservation success stories of the last ten years. I’ve been proud to play a part – see these old posts here, here and here – and in particular supervising Jamie Wildman’s PhD work. The second paper from his thesis has just been published and in it Jamie documents how you can identify individual butterflies by their markings and use this information to estimate the population size, life-span, and movements of Chequered Skippers. The technique could also be applied to other distinctively marked butterfl ..read more

Back in August 2022, Karin and I traveled to Kenya where I was teaching on a Tropical Biology Association field course at the Mpala Research Centre – see my posts from the time here and here. Students on the course have to complete an extended group project, with supervision by teaching staff. Two of the groups looked at the visitors to flower heads of one of the dominant savannah acacias and the interactions between wild honey bees of the native subspecies and the other insects. There have been rather few studies of this honey bee in the wild and so we wrote up the work as a short research n ..read more

It must be the best part of a decade since the last time I visited Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. When I was still teaching at the University of Northampton we took students there every year to show them the diverse lowland heath landscapes, the ancient oak forest, the birch woods and the alder carr that runs through one of the small valleys. Now that Karin and I have moved back to Britain, I can revisit some of these old haunts to see how much they have changed. Yesterday I returned to Cannock Chase with a group of friends, all former or current academics, a mix of geograp ..read more

During the 2020 lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I coordinated an international network of pollination ecologists who used standardised methods to collect data in their gardens. I blogged about it at the time – see here and here for instance – and also put up a post when the data paper from that work was published. Several research groups are now working with that huge data set and interrogating it for answers to a wide range of questions. The first group to actually publish a paper from the data is a largely Chinese set of researchers from the Key Laboratory of Plant Resources, Cons ..read more

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are calling for volunteers to contribute to their investigation of the springtime pollen diets of bumblebees in the UK countryside. Spring is a critical season for colony-establishing bumblebees, but little is known about what types of pollen they collect at this time. In particular, trees, shrubs, and woodland flowers may make significant contributions to bumblebee pollen diets. Volunteers are needed from across the UK to collect pollen samples from live bumblebees in April and May this year. These will then be analysed by the rese ..read more

The reviews of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship are starting to appear in blogs, magazines and journals. The latest, by Diane Campbell, has just been published in the Journal of Pollination Ecology and I’m so pleased that it was positive! I’ve only met Diane a couple of times at conferences but I have a lot of respect for her work. The review is fair and balanced, and gratifyingly enthusiastic, for example: In this delightful book, [Ollerton] describes the ways that birds and flowers interact. As in his previous book, Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Soc ..read more

A message from Dr Debora Drucker, WorldFAIR Agricultural Biodiversity Case Study Lead: Registration is open to our contribution to the WorldFAIR webinar series – “Reusing Plant-Pollinator Datasets: a Global Perspective with Guidelines and Recommendations inspired by Pilot Studies from Africa, the Americas and Europe”. It will be held on April 18 at 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm (Times in UTC) – https://worldfair-project.eu/event/the-worldfair-webinar-series-reusing-plant-pollinator-datasets-a-global-perspective-with-guidelines-and-recommendations-inspired-by-pilot-studies-from-af ..read more

In my new book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship I spend a bit of time discussing the idea of the bird pollination syndrome that we refer to as ‘ornithophily’, its limitations, and the fact that it has two distinct meanings that are often conflated. One of the problems with ornithophily, and indeed all of the syndromes, is that historically it’s sometimes blinkered scientists to the extent that they only look at the flower visitors that are “right” for the syndrome, ignoring the rest or dismissing them as “secondary pollinators”, a term I dislike. Why do I dislike ..read more

The final deliverable from the WorldFAIR Project with which I’m involved has recently been published and can be freely downloaded from Zenodo by following the link below. The report is called “Agricultural biodiversity FAIR data assessment rubrics” and in it we present the results from a series of six pilot studies that adopted the FAIR* standards and our recommendations from the previous report. This document complements the previous one by giving examples and setting out guidelines that allow researchers and practitioners to ensure FAIRness in their plant-pollinator interaction data. Here’s ..read more

One of the most productive research collaborations in which I’ve had the pleasure to be involved has been with André Rodrigo Rech in Brazil. It started when he was a postgrad working on his PhD, and has now continued as André has developed into fully-fledged academic with his own research group. That productivity has been fueled by a lot of coffee, of course, as you’ll know if you’ve read my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society! Our most recent paper concerns coffee production in Brazil and how the design and management of plantations can both support wild bee populations AN ..read more