Dr. Scott Edwards spent from June 6 to August 20, 2020, on a 76-day, 3800-mile bicycle trip across the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. In this talk he will discuss some of the amazing people, landscapes, and birds he encountered, mostly in rural towns and along blue highways. The gradually changing birdscape, both in sight and sound, underscored the sensitive ecological gradients to which birds respond, as well as the ability of some species to thrive in agricultural monocultures. Recent incidents in the U.S involving African Americans as targets of white violence induced him to festoon his bicycle with #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) signs and share his experiences on social media. He encountered a variety of reactions, often positive and occasionally sharply negative, in a sea of generosity and extraordinary kindness as he wheeled his way through towns on the brink of collapse, vast private ranches, and the occasional city. Two imperatives that Dr. Edwards took away from his journey, with ramifications for both biodiversity and political stability, were to bring divergent communities together and to encourage empathy at the national level among communities that otherwise experience each other only on TV.
Dr. Scott V. Edwards is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His research focuses on diverse aspects of avian biology, including evolutionary history and biogeography, disease ecology, population genetics, and comparative genomics. He has carried out fieldwork in phylogeography in Australia since 1987 and conducted some of the first phylogeographic analyses based on DNA sequencing. His work led him to study the large-scale structure of the avian genome and informed his current interest in using comparative genomics to study the genetic basis of phenotypic innovation in birds. His recent work uses comparative genomics in diverse contexts to study macroevolutionary patterns in birds, including the origin of feathers and the evolution of flightlessness.