During one week, at the lovely landscape of Mértola city, we taught at the PhD Advanced Course “Conservation Genetics: fundaments and applications”, organized by my former coleagues Paulo Célio alves, Soraia Barbosa from the University of Porto. I joined a team of invited teachers, along Matthew P. Hare and Jeremy Searle from Cornell University.

My talks on Conservation Breeding and Genetic Monitoring.

It is with extreme pleasure that I join the team of curators of the MUHNAC - National Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon as Bird Curator. These avian collections hold extraordinary collections from Portugal and from several PALOP countries.

A major institution on Europe, with centuries of knowledge to curate for the future .

Carla is a PhD student on Veterinary Medicine from the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Cluj-Napoca (Romania). While she is waiting for her PhD defense, she visited our lab and helped us optimizing our protocols for digitizing large images of avian blood smears.

These images will be used to test the machine learning approaches that are being developed under the WIMANET COST Action objectives.

We were glad to host Carla Culda during this short stay, where she enjoyed some of the Portuguese culture and helped us advancing methodologies on avian malaria curation

During the first half of March, every Saturday, the Little Naturalists explored the world of birds at the Biodiversity Hall and Botanical Garden of the University of Porto. They delved into the fascinating universe of birds, observing and describing their diverse features: beaks, feet, wings, feathers, scales, and eggs in all colors, shapes, and sizes. They also studied bird anatomy, behavior, and their remarkable, sometimes surprising vocalizations. Through engaging games, they learned how to classify birds into groups based on shared characteristics. Alongside species observed in the U.Porto Botanical Garden, they explored preserved specimens from MHNC-UP’s collections.

Birds and the amazing small naturalists.

During two days we taught an introductory online course on genomics of malaria parasites. From NGS technologies, to Command Line introduction, all the way to pipelines to assemble genomes of malaria parasites.

Tired but happy teachers and students, after two days looking at genomic data and pipelines.

During several days, we organized an workshop to analyse the data already colected for the first Breeding Bird Atlas of Cabo Verde. At Rui Vaz, in the interior of Santiago island, members of all NGOs that collaborate in this project shared their experiences and prepared for the next season of data collection.

The whole team relaxing at Rui Vaz. Hany Alonso from SPEA is making the photo

Nadito Barbosa won a PhD grant from the Portuguese National Science Agency (FCT) in 2024 and he just started his PhD at the BIODIV Doctoral Programme at FCUL. He will focus on enhancing the power of passive acoustic to monitor biodiversity in Cabo Verde, working closely with the NGOs from each island and complementing the ongoing Bird Atlas of Cabo Verde.

We are glad to have Nadito joining our team, and starting his PhD at FCUL.

During the last week of January, one of the greatest European ornithological events took place in Portugal. I maintained a stand of the Natural History Museums, showing the new book we published on the Canary. We had a lot of interesting new contacts and managed to spread the word on the importance of curating these resources made by artificial selection on natural history collections.

With Andy Early, from the Cage & Aviary Birds Magazine, from the UK