On the first day of Christmas (in about 2014), @duckswabber.bsky.social gave to me - a partridge in a pear tree. Happy Christmas everyone!

Tonight's spread. Slow roasted venison shank with onion and red wine sauce, roast potatoes and carrots, charred Brussels sprouts, steamed broccoli with cheese sauce, and Yorkshire's with an onion gravy. Merry Christmas all

Has he bean? 🫘

It's a Christmas day Parkrun and I am a terrible goose

On the first day of Christmas (in about 2014), @duckswabber.bsky.social gave to me - a partridge in a pear tree. Happy Christmas everyone!

The best thing about gang gang cockatoos is their permanent Santa hats 🎅

I endorse this

Very few things epitomise my experience of Britain like "all the toasters don't fit a widely available pre sliced loaf size"

Occasionally I'll talk about this time when I give talks and I can also assure you the straights today have NO idea what it was like.

Heated Rivalry is great, but we seem to keep skipping any queer story in media that happens between 1995-2005. Its either AIDS crisis/death/etc or (mostly)post-liberation/everone-just-getting-on-with-it.

teaser: most of them involve cases of ... interesting museum documentation (don't they all?) -is this our? -this is OURS?! -is that a <redacted>? -is that from <redacted>? -that's NOT a <redacted>!

With no disrespect to the good folks at posit.co, I'm super tired of authors using #rstats for their scientific analyses but only citing RStudio in their papers; I see this regularly as an editor.

stupendous thread, not a bad jpg in the bunch

I have received unsolicited bits of dead birds by post.

Schwules Museum got a shipment of erotic material from someone who had recently died and one box contained a still-lubricated insertable toy

Last few days to apply! ⬇️

I can corroborate this with my 4 years of bird observations from an island in the Western Aleutians that I reckon 5 other people have properly visited in the last 15 years. We had a 2nd North American record (Ninox [noonook] japonica, and some interesting Asian vagrants.

He's making a list, He's nailing it high, Indulgences, No longer apply, Martin Luther's coming to town

Very few things epitomise my experience of Britain like "all the toasters don't fit a widely available pre sliced loaf size"

Our most-attended online lecture of 2025 explored how Madagascar’s birds evolved in isolation, shaping one of the world’s most remarkable avian assemblages. Over 200 people joined Dr Sushma Reddy for an evening of insight into island evolution and biodiversity. Congratulations Sushma!

Dec 22nd is perhaps not the best time to have Thoughts about the Convention on Migratory Species

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

And it happened again: Dušan M. Brinkhuizen & Glen Valentine shared sounds of Seram Mountain Pigeon, Gymnophaps stalkeri: xeno-canto.org/species/Gymn.... Since the species is on "Shaun's list" (xeno-canto.org/article/241) this appears to be the first ever sound recording. #bioacoustics

Happy Solstice for the homies, and curses of the Long Night for my enemies.

MERRY FESTIVE SEASON! Please enjoy our last episode of 2025 m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekkC... Brilliant festive stories from around the world from @joshlukedavis.com and @nhcooper123.bsky.social illustrated by some incredible specimens, including some very historically important models. 🍄

Good news, everyone! All the prayers and sacrifices to Apollo worked! The days get longer from here 🌞 👍🏛️🍑 #MuseumBums "Chariot of the Sun" painted on the ceiling of the Camera del Sole e della Luna in 1526, by Giulio Romano, at the Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy

The rituals and sacrifices are working. Longer days start tomorrow. The sun had been appeased. ☀️ #solstice

Ah, the northern winter solstice. A magical seasonal event where we can all come together and say UR ON FUCKEN NOTICE, SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE, WE’RE COMING FOR YOUR DAYLIGHT FROM TOMORROW

Share your mood for the weekend

I’m not the biggest fan of boxing as a concept, but I do think we’re at the point where the only thing that’s going to prove to some people that they aren’t the main character with pro level skills at anything they want is to be punched in the face repeatedly.

I've been thinking about this a lot and I wonder what practical steps we can take to A) identify this, and B) deal with it (as reviewers and editors)

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Merry Yule! It’s the shortest day of the year and we can now look forward to the return of the light! The Romans seem to have been a bit confused about measuring the daylight and celebrated Sol on 25th December instead. That will never catch on! www.instagram.com/reel/DSStf1u...

Short news piece on the Challenger expedition and the Band-rumped fiesta: britishbirds.co.uk/news/band-ru... #RareBirdsUK

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

The T in t-shirt stands for Tyrannosaurus

Perhaps there should be a small fee for every time you post a screenshot on Bluesky of some bullshit happening on X. Like the original 10p carrier bag charge, it wouldn't be prohibitive but it would make you think, hang on, do I have to do this?

This thread is a wild ride that is also so quintessentially English in its hubris (and outcomes). That said, for a series of buildings most of which are many (many) centuries old I'm surprised it wasn't worse.

📢 NOMINATE FOR BOU COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP ➡️ Awards Nominations Committee ➡️ Engagement Committee ➡️ IBIS Management Committee ➡️ Meetings Committee ➡️ Records Committee Plus NEW Committee Shadowing Scheme Full details: bou.org.uk/about-the... #ornithology 🪶

My response to anything over the next two weeks

No paper from me or my lab will ever be submitted to an MDPI journal - including any of their superfluous "special issues". I will very rarely (if ever) cite MDPI papers. And I will never review for them. deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/08/gues... The same goes for FrontiersIn journals, among others.

Little owl showing well, 475-465 BC. Please park your chariot sensibly and give the bird space to feed naturally.

PER MY LAST TABLET,

Absolutely shocking. We're offering an overall award of £10k for information that leads to a conviction in these cases. We need to make raptor persecution a thing of the past.

The United Kingdom is coming back to Erasmus+ 🇪🇺🇬🇧 We have concluded negotiations for the United Kingdom’s association to Erasmus+ in 2027, making further steps in our renewed EU-UK Strategic Partnership. More ↓ link.europa.eu/vf3vJk

From my own niche: institutions of higher education should stop chasing trends, work internally to assert a set of values, and then build curriculum around those values.

Apparently, the collective noun for Parids is 'troupe' and I will henceforth insist on this terminology in all my peer reviews.

Don't let an app sync your fucking contacts.

TIL