Bird Talk

Jeremy Hyman, PhD, teaches ornithology and animal behavior at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. He studies the interplay of cooperative and competitive interactions in territorial communication in birds. He has written birding columns for a regional newspaper and gives talks to birding enthusiasts.Barbara Ballentine is Associate Professor at Western Carolina University. Ballentine's work focuses on the evolutionary mechanisms underlying phenotypic variation and population divergence in animals, primarily birds. Using highly-integrative and experimental approaches with both field and laboratory studies Ballentine specifically addresses how sexual selection favours reliable mating signals; how natural selection constrains the expression of mating signals and mechanisms of phenotypic (morphological and behavioural) variation between populations.Dr. Mike Webster is the Robert G. Engel Professor of Ornithology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at Cornell University, and also Director of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He has studied the effects of ecological factors on bird breeding behaviour, the ways that sexual selection shapes courtship signals like plumage colour and song and the effects of those signals on the process of speciation. His research focuses primarily on Australian fairy-wrens, North American wood warblers and Neotropical blackbirds.