Career
His books with John Krebs helped to define the field of behavioural ecology, the study of how behaviour evolves in response to selection pressures from ecology and the social environment. His study of a small brown bird, the dunnock, linked detailed behavioural observations of individuals to their reproductive success, using deoxyribonucleic acid profiles to measure paternity and maternity, and revealed how sexual conflicts gave rise to variable mating systems including: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry and polygynandry. His studies of cuckoos and their hosts have revealed an evolutionary arms race of brood parasite adaptations and host counter-adaptations.
Other studies include: territory economics in pied wagtails.
Contest behaviour and mate searching in butterflies and toads. Parent-offspring conflict and the transition to independence in young birds.
T. In 2007, he made an episode of The Natural World with David Attenborough focusing on the cuckoo. In 2011 he presented a British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 documentary entitled "The Cuckoo".
