All around us, all the time, the birds are telling us who they are and what they are doing. In this talk, Nathan Pieplow unlocks the secrets of their language. You’ll listen in on the pillow talk of a pair of Red-winged Blackbirds, and learn the secret signals that Cliff Swallows use when they have found food. You’ll learn how one bird sound can have many meanings, and how one meaning can have many sounds – and how, sometimes, the meaning isn’t in the sounds at all.
Nathan Pieplow grew up in South Dakota, where he got started identifying bird songs by studying the classic “Birding By Ear” field guides in the Peterson series. He is now a sound recordist and ethologist (a student of animal behavior). Pieplow lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado. He is a former editor of the quarterly journal, Colorado Birds and one of the developers of the Colorado County Birding Website and the Colorado Birding Trail.
About Naturalist Nights:
Each winter, ACES partners with Wilderness Workshop and Roaring Fork Audubon to co-host the popular Naturalist Nights speaker series, bringing a great line-up of experts to explore topics of the natural world with our community.
