The Oxford Navigation Group
Tim Guilford
he/him
Professor of Animal Behaviour
Tutorial Fellow in Zoology at Merton College
Research interests:
Although I still maintain an interest in the evolution of animal signals, especially warning signals, which was the subject of my early research, I now concentrate on trying to unravel the mechanisms by which animals map the environments through which they travel. What cues do birds use to navigate home across familiar areas? What do their maps look like? How versatile is the spatial knowledge they store?
The questions range from cognitive to ecological, shearwaters and homing pigeons are the principal models, and the techniques involve field experiments using miniature GPS loggers, on-board cameras, and analytical approaches borrowed from computational engineering. Most recently I have been extending my research group’s work to trying to understand how long distance wandering seabirds (many of which are of vulnerable conservation status) migrate, map and navigate across the open oceans.
For overviews see:
Guilford, T. (2019) "The shearwater's world." British Birds, 112: 9-25.
Guilford, T. & Biro, D. (2014). “Route following and the pigeon’s familiar area map.” Journal of Experimental Biology, 271:169-179. DOI:10.1242/jeb.092908
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