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Monthly Meeting – October 8, 2024
Oct 8 ✪ Monthly Meeting ✪ Tue 7:30 pm
Social Time at 7:00 pm
St James’s Episcopal Church,1018 Farmington Ave, WH
Speaker: Sylvia Halkin, Ph.D.
Changes in Northern Cardinal Songs Over Time and Space
A Northern Cardinal learns its songs from its neighbors during its first year of life. The same repertoire of 8-12 songs is sung by all the male and female cardinals in a local population, but some songs are not sung by cardinals outside that population, while other songs are much more widespread. To better understand how songs evolve, in 2021 I recorded cardinals at the same location where I had recorded them intensively in the 1980s! Some songs had added a new segment but were still recognizable after 40 years; others had been replaced by completely different songs. The long-lasting songs were also the most widespread: they were sung along much of the length of 100-mile N/S and E/W transects centered on the 1980s recording location. Such widely shared songs may help cardinals to communicate with new neighbors if they settle away from the location where they learned their songs.
Sylvia was a Professor in the Biology Department at CCSU for 30 years, teaching Ornithology, Animal Behavior, Natural History of Connecticut, Field Biology courses abroad (England, Ireland, Australia, India), and other courses to undergraduate and graduate students. Her published research includes articles on how birds use their song repertoires, nut-caching behavior of eastern gray squirrels (with CCSU student co-authors, also included in an Animal Planet “Most Extreme Pirates” episode), and on foraging niches of Black-capped Chickadees and Tufted Titmice, Sandy’s Point’s Least Tern colony, and how strangler figs may help their host trees to weather storms (with CCSU student lead authors John Correia, Jennifer Healy, and Leora Richard, respectively). She is the lead author of the comprehensive Birds of the World species account for Northern Cardinals, researched and written with a great team of co-authors.
Frances D’Amico frandamico525@yahoo.com 203-237-2734