Birds and Us - Public Lecture
Bangor University and the Bangor Bird Group are delighted to be able to offer a free public lecture by Prof. Tim Birkhead FRS on Wednesday, 1 March at Pontio. Doors open at 6.00pm and the lecture starts at 6.30pm.
The lecture will cover human interactions with birds throughout our 12,000 years of documented history; from Egyptian Ibis Mummies, through scientific experimentation, engineering mimicry and artistic inspiration, to concern for their conservation and wellbeing.
Professor Tim Birkhead is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an Emeritus Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Sheffield's School of Biosciences.
His research on promiscuity and sperm competition in birds re-shaped our understanding of bird mating systems. Tim is committed to the public understanding of science as has written several popular science books, including Promiscuity (2000), The Wisdom of Birds (2008), Bird Sense (2012) The Most Perfect Thing: the Inside (and Outside) of a Birds’ Egg (2016), What it’s Like to be a Bird (2021) and Birds and Us (2022). His children’s book What it’s like to be a Bird (2022) illustrated by Catherine Rayner won the English Association’s Margaret Mallett Award in May 2022.
In addition to his role as a researcher and teacher he has promoted evolutionary ideas, through talks to the public, and articles in the media, and on television. His TED talk has been viewed over 100,000 times.
Tim has featured on The Life Scientific (Radio 4) and The Infinite Monkey Cage (Radio 4), Sir David Attenborough referred to Tim’s book The Most Perfect Thing (in BBC-Wildlife magazine as ‘Magnificent’). In 2018 Attenborough and Birkhead went on to make a BBC documentary: Attenborough’s Wonder of Eggs. The script was entirely from the book. Tim has also featured on BBC Radio 4 Start the Week talking about the publication of Birds and Us (Penguin/Viking 2022), and BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions (broadcast 17 April 2022), and on Lauren Laverene’s ‘Supernature’ (BBC6 Music on 5 December 2022). He is married with three children and a dog, and in his spare time paints and plays the guitar.
Current main areas of interest:
- Sexual Selection in Birds
- Population Biology of Birds
- History of Reproductive and Ornithological Science
- Author of popular ornithological books: a selected list-
- The Red Canary (2004)
- The Wisdom of Birds (2008) (Winner “Best Bird Book of 2009” – BTO & British Birds)
- Ten Thousand Birds (2011)
- Bird Sense (2012) (Winner “Best Bird Book of 2012” – BTO & British Birds)
- The Most Perfect Thing: the inside (and outside) of a Bird’s Egg. (2016) (Winner “ZSL 2017 communicating zoology prize”)
- What it is like to be a Bird (2021)
- Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History (2022)
Selected media contributions:
- Written articles for The Guardian, The Biologist, Independent, and appeared on The Life Scientific and The Infinite Monkey Cage and Given a TED lecture, among many other presentations.
Selected Awards:
- McColvin Medal for best reference book: Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ornithology, 1991
- Elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), 2004
- Elected Honorary Member of the Linnaean Society, 2011
- Elliot Coues Medal, American Ornithologists Union, 2011
- Medal of the Association for the Study of Animal Behavior, 2012
- BioScience Teacher of the Year, Society of Biology, 2013
- Silver Medal, Zoological Society of London, 2014
- Eisenmann Medal, the Linnaean Society of New York, 2016
- Godman-Salvin Medal, British Ornithologists’ Union, 2016
- Stephen Jay Gould Prize, for increasing public understanding of evolutionary biology, 2017
