Guest Speaker: Dr. Henry Pollock, UIUC 
Henry is an ecologist with a passion for natural history and conservation. He has worked primarily on birds in a variety of interesting places, including Panama, Peru, Equatorial Guinea, and Guam. In his free time, you can find him birding, hiking, or appreciating the beauty of the natural world.

Topic: The importance of long-term studies: a window into the lives of tropical rainforest birds of Panama
Henry has worked in the lowlands of Panama for 10+ years studying the ecology and population biology of tropical forest birds. His talk will focus on the importance of long-term studies for understanding these elusive birds and how their populations will fare in the face of environmental change.​

This meeting will be held in person at DHNC. Light refreshments will be provided, and round table discussion to follow the talk. 

Please consider joining us on Saturday, March 12th at 9am to hear from long-time Bird Club member Ron Bradley! To learn more about our Live to Learn speaker series or register for upcoming talks, click here.

Our speaker is: Dr. Jeffrey Lucas, Purdue University
Topic: What we miss when we listen to bird song: the hearing side of avian communication.

This meeting will be held in person at DHNC. Light refreshments provided. Our guest speaker will be joining us via Google Meet. Bird Club members are welcome to attend the meeting virtually if they are unable to attend in person. 

Meeting link:
To join the video meeting, click this link: https://meet.google.com/xwa-ozcx-jbp
Otherwise, to join by phone, dial +1 336-904-9307 and enter this PIN: 178 309 758#
To view more phone numbers, click this link: https://tel.meet/xwa-ozcx-jbp?hs=5

Description:
What we miss when we listen to bird song: the hearing side of avian communication

Jeff Lucas
Dept of Biological Sciences
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN
​
Birders use spectrograms to help them understand bird song. When doing so, we implicitly assume that
birds are hearing what we see in the spectrogram. If so, then we’d expect that details of how birds hear
should match details of their song properties, and they often do. For example, tufted titmice use very
high frequency alarm calls and indeed have very good high frequency hearing. Similarly, birds with very
tonal song (e.g. titmice) are not very good at processing rapidly changing frequencies, but birds with
very rapid elements in their song (e.g. white-crowned sparrows) are better than you are at processing
rapid frequency changes (!).
Birds (and all other vertebrates) are also able to retune their auditory system across seasons.
Comparisons of their song with auditory performance suggest that they retune their auditory system in
the breeding season to extract song properties at enhanced levels. For example, Carolina chickadees
have a broad-band song that matches the upregulation of processing of a wide range of tones in the
breeding season. In contrast, white-breasted nuthatches have a song with maximum intensity at about
2 kHz, and their auditory system only gets better at 2 kHz during their breeding season.
We tested this further with 9 sparrow species that vary in habitat preference and song properties. The
song properties are not shared between related species, but they are strongly affected by habitat. Open
adapted species tend to have rapid, high frequency songs whereas closed-canopy species tend to have
low-frequency tonal songs. Oddly, there was no correlation between habitat and the range of
frequencies they hear well. Surprisingly, we found that song type (trill vs more complex notes)
correlated strongly with hearing properties – the implication is that the properties of trills are processed
very differently than the properties of more complex songs (say of song sparrows). These data on
sparrows suggest that the spectrogram does not tell the whole story. Which makes bird song all the
more interesting!

A bird club member has passed along the following opportunity.
If you are interested and may qualify, find more information here: ​http://www.champaigncountyaudubon.org/research-grants/