Stephen Lang  - PhD student at the University of Konstanz & Max Planck Institute for Ornithology

Recently contributed posts:

• Procrastination is the thief of time

Like many biologists, my curiosity for the natural world began in childhood (I had a personal fondness for dinosaurs). Though biology classes held my attention, my interest in animal behaviour and ecology only started after I went on a school field trip to the welsh coast. After days of peering into rock pools, streams and the forest undergrowth with some incredible science teachers in tow, I began to see the world in an entirely different way.
 
I studied for undergraduate and master’s degrees in Zoology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, which both involved a field course, and a field-based research project. For my master’s project, I studied the staging ecology of migrating geese in Iceland. This was the first time I’d conducted my own research, and by this point I’d firmly decided that fieldwork was one of my favourite parts of being a scientist. After graduating I worked as a forestry technician in Wytham woods, and then found a position as an intern and later a field assistant at the Edward Grey Institute, studying songbird social behaviour. Whilst at the EGI, I collaborated with a colleague (now my PhD supervisor) to run some field experiments investigating the starvation-predation trade-off in songbirds. The core concepts of this study formed the basis of my PhD application to study how predators hunt collective prey. I now split my time between living in Germany and doing fieldwork in the UK.