Bob Montgomerie received his PhD at McGill University, followed by a 10-year research fellowship at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he is now Professor and Research Chair in Evolutionary Biology. In 2010 he received the American Ornithologists’ Union’s Elliott Coues Award, which “recognizes extraordinary contributions to ornithological research.” The citation for his award reads, in part: “Bob Montgomerie is a Canadian behavioral ecologist, best known for his wide-ranging studies of sexual selection and parental care in birds. His research program is noteworthy both for the broad diversity of species and topics in which he and his students have made important contributions and for his creative insights and questions…. He is widely recognized as a leader in the study of plumage color, and here, too, he has studied a wide variety of species. The overarching theme is to understand plumage evolution in a broad ecological and life-history context…. He is a Fellow of the AOU and has received numerous awards for both research and graduate teaching.” Prof. Montgomerie writes of his talk, “Recent technological advances have allowed us to measure accurately the colors that birds display, and to estimate what they see when they look at each other. The surprise is that they are much more colorful than they look to us, and that they can detect subtle differences in coloration that are invisible to us. Over the past 20 year my research group has studied the colors and displays of fairywrens and bowerbirds in Australia, ptarmigan and buntings in the high arctic, robins, swallows and goldfinches in Ontario, and feral peafowl in LA, NY and Toronto. I will use these studies to address what I think are some fascinating questions about the evolution of bird colors. Why are they so colorful? What do they look like to each other? Why are some colors so common and others so rare? How does the color of their plumage influence mating and social interactions? Why are females of some species so brightly colored? How do they use ambient light to enhance their colorful displays? Why do so many species lay colorful eggs?”
