Monday, August 13, 2012 | 7:00 p.m.
Frederic Wood Theatre, UBC
Free
North American Ornithological Conference – Vancouver 2012 (NAOC-V), the Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Nature Vancouver are pleased to offer a free public lecture “Frequent Fliers: Tracking Songbird Migration through the Americas” by internationally renowned scientist, Dr. Bridget Stutchbury from York University.
Each fall, billions of songbirds leave Canada on an epic journey to their far-away wintering grounds in Central and South America where many live in tropical forests shared by toucans, howler monkeys, and jaguars. Dozens of species have experienced serious, long-term population declines that are driven in part by the threats that these birds face on migration and while in the tropics. But only recently has it been possible to track the entire migration of individual songbirds to find out how they accomplish their amazing 10,000 km (or more!) round trip and to map out critical habitats used during migration. Bridget Stutchbury will reveal her surprising migration tracking results for Purple Martins, Red-eyed Vireos and Wood Thrushes and discuss how this research can help us save songbirds.
Multimedia
Biography
Bridget Stutchbury was born in Montreal and raised in Toronto. She completed her M.Sc. at Queen’s University and her Ph.D. at Yale, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology at York University, Toronto. Since the 1980s, she has followed songbirds to their wintering grounds in Latin America and back to their breeding grounds in North America to understand their behaviour, ecology and conservation. She serves on scientific advisory committees for World Wildlife Fund Canada, Wildlife Preservation Canada, and Earth Rangers. She is also author of Silence of the Songbirds (2007 finalist for the Governor General’s Award) and The Bird Detective (April 2010).