Were Australia’s lyrebirds the first ‘meme generators’? By Pat Leonard September 17, 2018 Australia’s Superb Lyrebird – the most astonishing animal mimic in the world – has been communicating with memes through song and dance for millions of years. “These days we usually think of memes as bits of culture…
Irby Lovette just began a three-year term as the incoming Director of the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates, the home of the research collections that are co-located with the Lab in the Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity. The CUMV is small in terms of staff — just three additional professionals…
Irby Lovette was honored with Cornell’s Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award during this past graduation weekend. The awards, which are given each year to four faculty from across the campus and which are Cornell’s highest recognition for advising, underscore of the importance of engagement with undergraduates and are based…
We had a great semester of engagement with lots of Cornell undergraduates this Spring! In addition to the many less formal forms of instruction and mentoring to which everybody contributes, people from our group who were involved in official teaching and advising this semester included: Stepfanie Aguillion: Stepfanie led the…
This semester a bunch of us are involved in the 5th offering of the Galapagos curriculum for Cornell undergraduates, including a really wonderful voyage through the archipelago over Spring Break. Course leaders include Stepfanie Aguillon who is teaching the associated Freshman Writing Seminar, Natalie Hoffmeister who is teaching the Evolutionary…
We are back from two exciting weeks in Patagonia where Irby and Leo have led for the second consecutive year the field-course portion of “BioEE2525/BioEE2526 Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife in the Neotropics”. Together with co-leaders Roxanne Razavi, David Toews, Natalia García and a group of 12 Cornell students, we…
Our lab group enjoyed an all-day retreat today, with a break to attend the Lab of Ornithology holiday party. We covered lots of ground in discussing research, outreach, and professional development topics. But perhaps the most important outcome of the sillier part of the late afternoon was the anointing of…
Semesters always end with a somewhat bittersweet feeling, as classes come to a close and thoughts turn to exams and then to activities over the forthcoming break. My thanks to the 25 different people who presented in Ornithology Seminar (Bioee7800) this Fall, and to the many regular weekly participants (audience…
So far, so good … everyone in our group of freshman advisees seems to be transitioning well to Cornell after these first weeks of Fall classes, in part owing to the wise mentoring by my student advising partner Alyssa Rodriguez (thanks, Alyssa!). And way to go, freshmen! Shown here: (top…
Happy SNEEB to all: Our lab group joined with the Lab of Ornithology postdocs more generally to host the inaugural Fall semester SNEEB (the Friday social hour for departments with the prior names of Systematics and Ecology, Entomology, and Neurobiology and Behavior…) last evening. Took a little more pre-planning than…
Winged warblers: the story is out! David Toews’ presentation on the work he and Scott Taylor have led on the genomics of Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers played to a standing-room-only audience at the North American Ornithological Conference yesterday, and apparently there were many dozens of additional people left outside who…
Our new Handbook of Bird Biology is here! This week we received the very first advance copies of our new comprehensive textbook of ornithology, just in time to share it with the world at the big NAOC bird conference in August. This means that it will be available from booksellers…
Evolution2016: Leo presented on the genomic landscape of differentiation in capuchino seedeaters at the Evolution conference in Austin, TX. The Capuchino’s have shown very little genetic differences in previous studies, but using data from whole genome sequencing we were able to find narrow divergence peaks among species. Many of these…
Postdoc Dave Toews presented the ongoing research in the lab on the genomic consequences of hybridization between golden-winged and blue-winged warblers, which he is working on closely with postdoc Scott Taylor and others. David described how there are only a few genomic regions that differ between these taxa and that…
Lovette Lab field trip, with 600 lbs of party favors for people to take home… left to right, that’s Jen Walsh, Natalie Hofmeister, Leo Campagna, Irby Lovette, and half of Daisy the former Cow.
Cornell article on our Patagonia field course: http://spring2016.periodicals.cals.cornell.edu/students/new-ecology-course-takes-students-patagonia
New Ornithology textbook coming this summer… just got the final cover proofs for our massively revised Handbook of Bird Biology, along with an official publication date of August 1, 2016. Very happy to finally be able to say with confidence: look for it soon in bookstores near you…! …
NSF smiles upon us. In this era of 4% funding rates, we are particularly appreciative of having been awarded a significant grant from the National Science Foundation for a new study entitled “Quantifying genomic porosity in non-model radiations.” In addition to Irby and Leo Campagna (Leo was a prime mover…
Video highlights from our January 2016 field course in Patagonia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9jGu7ErMsE
Leo Campagna and I are finishing up our trip to Patagonia, where we are setting up logistics for our forthcoming field course and generally having a great time with both wildlife and Leo’s friends and family here in his home town of Puerto Madryn. Right whales, elephant seals, guanacos, grisson,…