Chapel Hill Bird Club Meeting (in person and by Zoom) — 28 October 2024
Dave Gammon—Navigating the Night: Monitoring Nocturnal Flight Calls for Migration Insights and Species Collision Risk
Do birds have an aesthetic sense when they sing? Most scientists, myself included, are hesitant to conclude the answer is 'yes.' On the other hand, it would be arrogant for us humans to assume the answer is 'no.' In this presentation I will describe my ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations with musicians who consider birdsong as music. Even though it remains impossible to understand the subjective thoughts of our feathered friends, I will conclude that studying birdsong as music leads to new insights and fruitful avenues for research.
Dave Gammon is an integrative scientist who builds bridges beyond traditional scientific communities. At Elon University he teaches mostly interdisciplinary science for non-science majors, but also courses that span both scientific and non-scientific disciplines, including one course team-taught with faculty in the Arts & Humanities. For two decades his bird research has focused mostly on the songs of one of the most musical animal species, the northern mockingbird.
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