Overview
The Bird Division, with two curators and three staff along with students, associates, and volunteers, continues a tradition of research and collections that dates back to the founding of the museum. The group studies all aspects of avian ecology and evolution, from the evolution of birds in deep time to the effects of anthropogenic environmental change, and from migration and biogeography to behavior and phenology to diet and parasites.
Shannon Hackett and John Bates, the current curators, study evolution at all levels of the avian taxonomic hierarchy, from how orders and families are related to genetic structure at the population level. Ben Marks is Collections Manager of Birds. Retired collections manager and adjunct curator Dave Willard continues active work in the collections and oversee salvage programs in the Chicago region and research on those collections. This work has been going on now for 40 years. Assistant Collections Manager, Thomas Gnoske, has done extensive taxidermy for the museum and for educational outreach programs. Collections Assistant Mary Hennen has monitored Chicago-region Peregrine Falcons for 25 years. Graduate students in the division work on a wide variety of topics covered in their personal profiles.
The Division continues to conduct active field research across multiple continents, particularly in Africa and South America. The countries and regions where we have worked in the last 10 years include Angola, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, the Philippines, and Peru, in addition to the United States.