Why It Took So Long to Appreciate Female Birds’ Songs
Image credit: Gary Chalker Getty ImagesAbstract
I wrote this piece with Lauryn Benedict, PhD to draw attention to our 2020 study describing female barn swallow song for the first time, and the Grade 5-12 lesson we created from it.
Type
Publication
Scientific American
Female birds sing. That is one of the revelations of our 2020 study on one of the most abundant, widespread, well-studied bird species in the world: the barn swallow. Despite the well over 1,000 scientific publications about this species, female barn swallow song had never previously been the focus of a research article. Why does it matter that female song has been ignored in this bird that breeds across most of the Northern Hemisphere? It highlights a long-standing bias and helps us think about why that bias persists…
Teach the GP Lesson Based on this Research