Monday, May 1, 2017, $10 (details below)

Join the Advanced Birding Club (ABC) of Tahoma Audubon and the Slater Museum of Natural History at the University of Puget Sound in presenting curator and Professor Emeritus of the University of Washington Burke Museum, Dr. Sievert Rohwer, who will discuss his inside view of molt and what we don’t know about it.  He will review his work that feather regrowth can’t be hurried, with the main differences between molt strategies having to do with how many feathers are molted at the same time: Simple (one at a time), Complex (various strategies including stepwise), and Simultaneous, with most feathers molted together.  He will start with an addendum to the earlier talk in December 2015 by reviewing new data for Golden Eagles showing that rectrices are replaced by need, rather than in a set sequence.  He’ll be talking generally about many years of work by Burke staff and students on molt migration that took us on surveys to great places in the SW and, finally, to coastal NW Mexico, where they discovered huge numbers of molt migrants.  This molt migration talk will review this issue in western passerines, and consider possible effects of habitat changes due to irrigated agriculture on the decline of some western breeders. 

Lecture Location: 

University of Puget Sound

1565 N Union Ave

Tacoma WA 98416

Building: Thompson Hall, Room 175

Price: $10, payable online through Tahoma Audubon at https://tahoma.z2systems.com/np/clients/tahoma/event.jsp?event=28380

 

Brief Bio:

Ph.D.  University of Kansas. 1971.

Curator of Birds and Professor of Biology, University of Washington 1972.

 

Dr. Rohwer studies “evolutionary ecology and behavior, mostly of birds, with interests in avian coloration, adoption of unrelated offspring by replacement mates, avian hybrid zones, brood parasitism, phylogeography, and life history implications of feather renewal.  Under my curatorship the ornithology collections at the Burke Museum became internationally distinguished, with the largest collection of extended wings in the world and the second largest collection of avian tissues in the world.”

 

Honors: 

2006. AOU Elliott Coues award recognizing “extraordinary contributions to ornithological research.”
2007. Cooper Society Katma Award for “formulation of new ideas that could change the course of thinking about avian biology.”

Review a short report on his earlier talk for ABC in December 2015 on molt here: http://abcbirding.com/abc-event-dec-2-dr-sievert-rohwer-on-molt/