This is a free, in-person event hosted by the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass as a part of the Wisconsin Science Festival. To register, please visit bmmglass.com.

Scientists have known how birds sing for decades but why they sing is still a puzzle. Do they sing for pleasure? For love? To mark a territory? And how do birds know when and what to sing? This talk will explore these questions and also address what birds learn by listening to songs.

Presenter Lauren Riters is a professor in the area of behavioral neuroscience in the department of integrative biology at UW-Madison. She received a Ph.D. in psychology in the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Bowling Green State University where she studied how birds migrate and return home from distant locations. This was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Liege in Belgium and at Johns Hopkins University where she began to study how and why birds sing.

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