A Trip to Avian Mars - The Weird and Wonderful Birds of Australia - Livestream

Bay Area birders often visit the Australian Garden in the UCSC Arboretum to see the hummingbirds. A glance at the plants, however, quickly reveals that Australian plants the hummingbirds visit are distinct and, in some cases, even bizarre compared to what we are used to in our own flora. What about the birds that associate with these plants in Australia? What are these birds like? And what about Australian birds more generally?

For UC Santa Cruz professor Bruce Lyon, going to Australia to study and observe birds is like going to avian Mars - in many ways the birds there are so completely different from our birds that it feels like visiting a different planet. In particular, one is struck by differences in evolutionary history, behavior and ecology. Bruce will show a selection of photographs from a month-long visit to a field station/nature park near Melbourne in 2016 where he had the opportunity to immerse himself completely in the natural history of Australian birds. He will cover some of the broad-brush features that make Australia’s bird life different from most other places and he will present natural history vignettes of a few of the more charismatic species to give a sense of the diversity of birds, and their behaviors and breeding systems, that one might see in a typical temperate Australian woodland.