birdsong

Why It Took So Long to Appreciate Female Birds’ Songs

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.

Testing the strength and direction of selection on vocal frequency using metabolic scaling theory

First, we demonstrate that Metabolic Theory of Ecology predicts the relationship between the natural log of body size and natural log of vocal frequency across 795 bird species, controlling for phylogeny...

Research

Though I have pivoted out of a traditional academic track, I am still continuing some work from my PhD and postdocs.

Global song divergence in barn swallows (Hirundo rustica): exploring the roles of genetic, geographical and climatic distance in sympatry and allopatry

Divergence in acoustic signals plays an important role in the production and maintenance of biodiversity in numerous taxa. In this study, we assess patterns of acoustic divergence in geographically isolated and sympatric subspecies of barn swallows …