Tim Birkhead is Professor of Behavioral Ecology at the University of Sheffield, England. He received his D. Phil. from Oxford in 1976. In 2011 the American Ornithologists’ Union presented him with its highest honor, the Elliott Coues Award, given for outstanding and innovative contributions to ornithological research. The AOU citation said in part, “His work has helped to re-shape our understanding of avian mating systems, and his unique combination of studies focusing on both free-living and captive birds has done much to shape modern ornithology… Birkhead became a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2004 [and] was President of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology from 1996–1998… In recognition of the global influence of his research he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the AOU in 2010 and an Honorary Member of the Linnaean Society of New York in 2011.” The author of more than 200 scientific papers and many popular articles, Birkhead has for ten years been a monthly columnist for the Times Higher Education. Among his thirteen books, he coedited The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ornithology (awarded the McColvin medal for best reference book of 1991) and wrote The Red Canary (awarded the Consul Cremer Prize) and The Wisdom of Birds (which received the Best Bird Book of the Year Award by the British Trust for Ornithology and the monthly journal British Birds in 2009). His talk is based on his most recent book, Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be A Bird. “This book,” he writes, “considers the senses of birds: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and so on to glean an idea of how birds perceive the world… I have always felt we have underestimated what’s going on in a bird’s head.” For further information, see bird-sense.com.”
