Claudia Wascher

Claudia A.F. Wascher is an Austrian behavioural biologist, specialising in avian cognition and the evolution of social behaviour, mainly studying corvids and greylag geese. She is a Professor of Behavioural Biology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), where she has been employed since 2015.

Early life and education Wascher, originally from Styria, Austria, showed an early interest in animal behaviour during an internship at the Konrad Lorenz Research Station (KLF) in Grünau, where she later conducted part of her research. She completed her Diplomstudium (equivalent to a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree) in Biology at the University of Graz between 2000 and 2005, and her PhD in Zoology/Animal Behaviour at the University of Vienna between 2005 and 2009.

Career After completing her PhD, Wascher held a series of postdoctoral research positions across Europe.

Between 2019 and 2024, Wascher chaired the Athena SWAN Science & Engineering faculty committee at ARU Cambridge, contributing to the faculty’s silver award in 2024. She has also held editorial board positions with Animal Behaviour (2018-2020), Avian Biology Research (2014-2024), Royal Society Open Science (2017-2024), and Frontiers in Comparative Psychology (2017-2021).

Wascher spoke about crow behaviour in relation to a crow named George, who has been attacking car windscreen wipers in Braintree, on the BBC The One Show in April 2020.

In August 2023 Wascher has appeared on the German-language Podcast Vogelguckerin, where she discussed avian cognition.

Wascher signed the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in April 2024, an international statement affirming scientific support for the study of subjective experience in non human animals.

Wascher also published, was interviewed for or mentioned in various international media articles.

Research Wascher’s research centres on the cognitive and physiological foundations of social behaviour, with a particular focus on the associated individual-level costs and benefits. She helped establish corvids as a model system for studying self‑control by conducting some of the first delayed‑gratification experiments in this group. She combines behavioural, physiological, and social network approaches to study how animals perceive and respond to their environment. More recently, Wascher has led research on the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on wildlife, with a particular focus on how fireworks and other sudden noise events affect the behaviour and physiological stress responses of greylag geese.

Social physiology and heart rate modulation Wascher’s early research on heart rate modulation has shown that social interactions have measurable physiological effects, increasing the heart rate significantly not only during direct interactions but also when individuals observe interactions involving their mate or close affiliates. A foundation of future‑oriented decision‑making is self‑control, which she examined using delayed gratification tasks with corvids.

Anthropogenic noise disturbance

Wascher’s research on anthropogenic disturbance demonstrated that New Year’s Eve firework displays cause substantial physiological stress in wild greylag geese. Using transmitters that recorded heart rate and core body temperature, she showed that during the peak of the fireworks the geese’s heart rate nearly doubled and their body temperature rose by around 3%. The study found that elevated stress levels persisted for several hours after the fireworks ended, and that geese do not become desensitised to repeated annual firework events. This work highlights fireworks as a significant but under‑recognised source of wildlife disturbance, with implications for energy expenditure, winter survival, and animal welfare.

Citations and Funding Wascher’s research has attracted significant scholarly attention, with more than 1,980 citations as of May 2026 (h-index: 24, i10-index: 44). She has secured over £900,000 in competitive research funding across her career, and in 2009 received a L’Oréal Austria Women in Science Fellowship for Young Female Scientists in Basic Research for her project Fairness and inequity avoidance in carrion crows, which was funded with €15,000.