Bridget Stutchbury

Bridget Stutchbury was born in Montreal and raised in Toronto. She completed her M.Sc. at Queen’s University and her Ph.D. at Yale, and was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology at York University, Toronto, and she is affiliated with more than a dozen organizations that seek to preserve bird habitats.

 

Why do birds have such glorious songs and such vibrant plumage? How do they choose their mates and care for their young? Do they have multiple sexual partners – and if so, how do they accomplish that, and how do their mates react? Why do they treat male and female offspring differently? Why do some bird mate as often as five or 10 times an hour?

 

Since the 1980s, Bridget Stutchbury has diligently sought the answers to these puzzles. In her research, she has followed songbirds to their wintering grounds in Latin America and back to their breeding grounds in the North America to understand their social behaviour, their migration patterns, their ecological niches, and the threats to their survival. Her research techniques include such high-tech techniques as radio telemetry and DNA testing – but she also prowls the woodlands listening and looking. She studies the astonishing migrations made by the tiniest of birds, and the threats posed by shrinkage and pollution of their habitat, the effect of forest fragmentation on their migratory success, and the risks posed to them by lighted, high-rise buildings.

 

In 2005, Dr. Stutchbury was named one of the Toronto Star’s “People to Watch” after her groundbreaking research into the sexual antics of birds made international headlines. She is the author of two books,   Silence of the Songbirds (2007), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction, and The Bird Detective (2010)  She divides her time between a home in Woodbridge, Ontario and a farm in northwestern Pennsylvania.