Tag Archives: audubon society

Upcoming MDAS talk

Posted on by
Reply

Here are the details regarding my upcoming Mount Diablo Audubon Society talk. This will be at the October monthly meeting (Thursday, Oct 4) at the normal location- Camellia room at the Gardens at Heather Farms in Walnut Creek. The meeting starts at 7PM, and the seminar should start around 8. This will be a sage-grouse talk, featuring how they make sound, and some of the conservation work headed up by Jessica and Gail.

I also received a follow up email regarding my 16 November talk at CCSF. Apparently I have the option of having my talk recorded, and also having the recording broadcast on community access television. Can’t help but think about Wayne’s World now!

How the syrinx got its name

Posted on by
Reply

Some of my work on sage-grouse has focused on how they make sound. In particular, we described a previously unknown “two-voice” phenomenon during the male courtship display, which led us to examine the vocal tract anatomy of the sage-grouse. We found that the form and musculature of the syrinx, the avian equivalent of the larynx, was much different than we expected based on what had been described for domestic chickens. In spite of this work on the syrinx, I didn’t know how this organ got its name. Well, now I know! A Golden Gate Audubon Society blog post by Burr Heneman details the greek myth and the wood nymph named Syrinx.

CCSF Talk in November

Posted on by
Reply

Besides teaching Intro to Evolution for the first time, I will have a few other things on my plate for this fall. The first one that’s actually been scheduled is a talk at City College of San Francisco. The CCSF Department of Biology has a long-running seminar series that is open to the public (note the fall schedule is not yet posted). The talk will be November 16, and I’ll be talking about wild turkeys instead of sage-grouse for a change. Appropriate for the week before Thanksgiving I guess!

I am hoping to arrange a local Audubon Society talk as well- I’ll post more about that as soon as I have any details. And my former colleagues at Berkeley (Sam Diaz-Muñoz, Emily DuVal, and Eileen Lacey) are threatening to write a review paper, and in the Patricelli Lab we will continue to forward on a number of sage-grouse projects. It should be enough to keep me busy!

Great Backyard Bird Count This Weekend

Posted on by
Reply

A very brief note that the annual Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend, February 17-20th. This citizen science event is put on by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and National Audubon Society. The premise is quite simple: identify the birds you see and hear at a location (could be your backyard, a local park), count them and keep track of how long you were birding, and enter the data on their website. With tens of thousands of people participating, the GBBC gives a powerful snapshot of late winter bird populations, especially those close to where people live.