People

Dr Sarah Pryke

We are broadly interested in behavioural and evolutionary ecology, including aspects such as alternative reproductive strategies, colour polymorphisms, sexual selection, multiple mating, parental care, maternal effects, physiological adaptations, speciation and conservation.

We mainly work with birds, and especially Australian finches, but we’ve also recently expanded our study systems to include some interesting reptiles.

We split our time between doing captive and field studies. Our field site is based in the tropical eastern Kimberley of Western Australia (see Facilities for more details).

Nina Svedin

Research Officer

Nina is originally from Sweden but is definitely an Aussie at heart – she has spent much of the last seven years here in Australia working on various finch projects (including a postdoc on long-tailed finches). Nina is an invaluable member of the lab – she keeps everyone properly organised (including all the birds), and helps out with all the fieldwork and our consultancy work.

PhD student

Cat did her Honours on co‐operation in social babblers at UNSW in 2007. Following this she has worked on a diverse range of research projects (and study systems) around the world, including South Africa, UK and Australia. She has recently started a PhD (2012) and will be combining field and laboratory experiments to explore the proximate and ultimate costs and fitness benefits of aggression in a highly colonial-nesting bird, the crimson finch.

Madeleine Yewers

PhD student

Maddy completed her Masters on animal personality differences in the superb fairy-wren in 2010 at Melbourne University. She is now doing her PhD also at Melbourne University with Devi Stuart-Fox and co-supervised by Sarah. She is looking at the function and evolution of male colour morphs in the tawny dragon lizard Ctenophorus decresii found in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia.

Anna Weier

PhD student

Anna did her Honours looking at the swimming performance of juvenile bass at the University of Queensland. She has recently started (2013) a PhD at Charles Darwin University, supervised by Michael Lawes and co-supervised by Sarah and Ian Radford (DEC). Anna will be looking at the effects of wildfire on the availability, phenology and nutritional content of seeding grasses, and their consequent effect on the behaviour, habitat use and distribution of Gouldian finches.

Louise Hatton

Honours student

Lou completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Wollongong in 2011. She majored in both Biological Science and Human Geography, but is choosing to follow her passion for evolutionary biology. Her honours project will examine some of the evolutionary costs of the Gouldian finch’s striking colouration, with particular regard to the role of predation.

David Hamilton

Frilly Finder

David is from Scotland but has spent much of the last two years in the tropical Kimberley region of Western Australia helping us out. He is usually found traipsing up hills after finches or more recently wrangling frillneck lizards in in the tropics – and always with a huge smile and great sense of humour.

Bruce Lavender

Nest-box-maker extraordinaire

Bruce lives in Melbourne but each year travels up to the Kimberley region of Western Australia where he does lots of bush walking and volunteers on a range of community and conservation projects. Each year Bruce spends a few weeks (or often many months) helping us make nest boxes and find fallen logs – and has single-handedly made hundreds (if not thousands!) of nest-boxes for the Gouldian finches.

Jade Pryke

Expert Gouldian finch finder

Jade was rescued during a field trip in 2005. Growing up surrounded by Gouldian finches (in captivity and the wild) she has become super tuned to them – and is now a professional Gouldian finch finder (and nest-box locator) in the field!