General Meeting – Online Presentation
January 19, 2024 – 7:00 PM
Via Zoom
“Dark-eyed Juncos: Adaptations to the Urban Environment”
Presented by Ellie Diamant and Samuel Bressler
Ellie Diamant is a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist interested in the interaction between human-caused environmental change and wildlife response, particularly birds in the built environment. She is currently a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Previously, she conducted her doctoral research at UCLA with Pamela Yeh. She explored how populations respond to multiple stressor interactions, with an emphasis on the pattern and process of behavioral and morphological adaptation in an urbanizing songbird, the dark-eyed junco, across Southern Californian cities.
Behaviorally, urban juncos have lower fearfulness across cities and novel nesting behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to explore how these behaviors are shaped by human activity, demonstrating key insights on behavioral adaptation to city living.
Please join us for this fun-filled program. The meeting room opens at 6:30 PM, join us for some virtual games prior to the 7:00 PM meeting.