At the Annual Dinner, Tim Birkhead will receive the Eisenmann Medal, the Linnaean Society’s highest award, given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur. Voted recently by BBC Wildlife Magazineas one of the most influential conservationists in the United Kingdom, Birkhead is professor of Behavioral Ecology at the University of Sheffield. Elected to the Royal Society in 2004 and the recipient of the Elliott Coues Award of the American Ornithologists’ Union in 2011, Birkhead has shaped modern ornithology with his studies of mating behavior among wild and captive birds. In addition to more than 200 scientific papers he has written award-winning books such as The Red Canary (2003) and The Wisdom of Birds (2008). For his 2012 talk before the Linnaean Society on “Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird,” Birkhead observed: “I have always felt we have underestimated what’s going on in a bird’s head.” Of his forthcoming talk he writes: “What does it mean to be an ornithologist? It means having a passion for birds, but it also means being a scientist. I will look back on the last 150 years of ornithology, since Darwin in fact, and examine the reasons we now know more about birds than almost any other group of animals. It is an account based on four years of research and a lifetime of personal experience. By focusing on avian sexual selection I hope to demonstrate the major contribution birds have made to biology as a whole. Ornithology has progressed so successfully because of the individuals who studied (and still study) birds. Because the story of ornithology is one of birds and people, I will look at the work of two amateur ornithologists who—despite approbation by professional ornithologists—revolutionized our understanding of bird behavior.”
