A common and well-loved little bird flits into the spotlight during this year's Paul C. Mundinger Distinguished Lectureship at Cornell University. The speaker will be Ben Sheldon, Professor of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford. Professor Sheldon's presentation is about a long-term study of the Great Tit in the United Kingdom, a bird similar to the ubiquitous Black-capped Chickadee across North America. It's a study that spans multiple generations of both the target species and the researchers and which has yielded key insights into bird ecology and evolution.
The Mundinger lecture is being held on October 6, at 5:30 p.m. in room B25, Warren Hall, on the Cornell University campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
For 75 years, researchers have been studying a population of Great Tits in Wytham Woods in the U.K. During the early days, researchers relied upon binoculars and bird leg bands. The work has now advanced to include to modern DNA analyses, tracking tags, and remote sensing tools.
"The scientific value of a long-term study expands in ways that can be hard to forecast," explained Professor Sheldon. "Who would have guessed in the 1960s that studying the same population of a common garden bird would yield key insights into how birds respond to climate change driven by human activities? Or that sequencing genomes would tell us about the operation of evolution in real time?"
Professor Sheldon will recount some of the highlights from the Great Tit research, explain why such long-term studies are so successful, and explore how to keep them viable for the next 75 years.
"The birds that we observe today are connected by genealogical relationships back across the generations almost to the start of the study," Sheldon explained. "It's a sobering thought when you hold a bird which can be traced back through more than 35 generations to before you were born."
This lectureship was established in honor of the late Paul Mundinger, who received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University.
The Mundinger lecture will also be streamed live via Zoom and Facebook.
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