Meetings and Speakers

Birds exhibit a wide array of behaviors—from sabotaging budding romances to outsourcing childcare duties. Why do they behave as they do? Using diverse examples from around the world, Dr. Wenfei Tong will present vignettes about the private lives of birds in an evolutionary context, to show the science behind how much humans and birds have in common. She will discuss stories from her books Bird Love and Understanding Bird Behavior that highlight the work of participatory scientists and female or minority biologists and illustrate the talk with her art and photographs.

About the Speaker: Wenfei is a biologist, conservationist and writer based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where she helps distill science to achieve targeted conservation outcomes. She has studied birds, guided tours, wrangled undergraduates, moved cattle and hunted in the grasslands of Montana and subsaharan Africa, and is writing her third book about the deep history humans and grasslands share. You can find out more about her work at www.wenfeitong.com