Indoor Program – Daniel Jared Field: From Big Years to Big Eras: Birding through Geological Time

Note: the meeting room has been changed for this meeting to the 6th floor room at the Whitney Center.  Staff will help you find the new location.

The present is an amazing time to be a birder. For example, Neil Hayward was able to set a new Big Year record in 2013 using modern birding networks, improved taxonomic knowledge, and ubiquitous transportation options. He recorded more than 700 North American species over a period of 12 months. Although the current diversity on the North American continent is im- pressive, the fossil record reveals some truly startling additions to the ABA checklist. While spotting a frogmouth or a mousebird in Wyoming today would incite a major twitch, paleontologists have revealed that these exotic lineages, along with many others, were present on our continent 50 million years ago. And there is surprising evidence of birds that, even further back in time, would have flown above the heads of dinosaurs. Tonight’s talk examines how the structure of North American avifauna has changed dramatically over evolutionary time, and will lead to a  discussion of the most fundamental ornithological question of all: Evolutionarily speaking, what is a bird? Who better to entertain this question than Daniel, a Yale Ph.D. candidate in the Dept. of Geology & Geophysics, where he studies the evolution of birds.