Brendah Nyaguthii is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, researching the emergence of multilevel societies in group-living birds during harsh environmental conditions such as drought in tropical areas and winter in temperate regions. Her research focuses on understanding how group-living animals thrive in unpredictable environments when resources are scarce. She uses state-of-the-art technology—Bluetooth low energy tags—to obtain GPS positions and study the movements and social behaviours of white-winged choughs in Canberra, South-eastern Australia. By using Bluetooth tags, she can quantify group-to-group associations during the challenging winter season. In parallel, she uses solar-powered GPS tags on vulturine guineafowl in Kenya, East Africa, to study how drought influences their associations in a tropical savanna ecosystem. Together, these two projects, one temperate and one tropical, but both in semi-arid ecosystems, aim to reveal how environmental challenges shape social structure across these very different species, providing insights with broad relevance for behavioural ecology and conservation in the face of climate change and the Anthropocene era. She tracks tagged vulturine guineafowl and monitors their associations in the field to complement my work on white-winged choughs. Through her work, she aims to build a strong foundation in behavioural ecology, practical field-based research, and the application of novel tracking technologies. Through a comparative approach spanning tropical and temperate regions, she aims to advance understanding of how social species behave and adapt to ecological uncertainties and environmental challenges.
Brendah is a recipient of the 2025 Cherry Gertzel Research Fund award. Brendah is in Kenya for three months to collect data during the non-breeding season. Her fieldwork observations reveal that during the drought season, the vulturine guineafowl range and movement shifts in response to reduced and patchy food resources across the landscape. When resources are less predictable, the socially stable groups begin to aggregate into large flocks. Rather than maintaining exclusive home ranges, the groups move together across expanded and overlapping areas in search of food. Overall, the dry season movement of the vulturine guineafowl illustrates how environmental constraints can drive coordinated movement and the emergence of complex, multilevel societies. On the other hand, in the temperate area of Canberra, during winter, the white-winged choughs tend to aggregate into flocks, composed of multiple groups that remain socially distinct within the aggregation. They exhibit repeated non-random associations with other groups.
Both studies, one in tropical and the other in temperate regions, show that seasonal limitation consistently drives the emergence of social structures like the multilevel societies that can arise from shared ecological pressures.

Brendah’s research reveals that, much like humans, birds rely on complex social systems to survive and adapt to diverse environmental conditions.

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