Roger Pasquier – December 2026

7:00 pm, Tuesday, December 8, 2026
The Liederkranz Club, 6 East 87th Street, New York City
Free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

Click here to register for in-person attendance. Please register at least a day before the event.

The Liederkranz Club opens for socializing at 6:30, with a beer, wine and beverage cash bar.

Disability access to the Liederkranz Club: see below*

You can also attend online via Zoom. Click here to register for the Zoom webinar.

Avian Sleep

Everybody enjoys watching birds during the daytime, but what do birds do at night, when they seem to disappear? Birds need sleep as much as we do, and they have evolved unique sleep habits to match their intensely energetic lifestyle. Instead of long stretches of obliviousness, they sleep in short bouts of several seconds or a few minutes, waking up to look around for danger, and then going back to sleep. To increase their vigilance, birds can sleep shutting off only half their brain and one eye at a time, leaving them able to respond instantly to any alarm. Roger Pasquier will discuss the evolution and benefits of sleep, focusing on how birds find shelter, keep warm, and stay alert, and recent discoveries that some birds can spend weeks and months in flight, in some cases with actual sleep. Human impacts like artificial light and noise as well as climate change, however, are changing how and where birds can get a good night’s rest.

Roger Pasquier, a member of the Linnaean Society since 1968, is an associate in the Department of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History. A lifelong birder, his career has been in ornithology and conservation, at the American Museum and the Smithsonian, and with BirdLife International, the World Wildlife Fund-US, Environmental Defense Fund, and National Audubon Society. He is the author of Watching Birds: An Introduction to Ornithology, Masterpieces of Bird Art: Seven Hundred Years of Ornithological Illustration, Painting Central Park, Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season, and Birds at Rest: The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep.

*Access: The Liederkranz Club has an elevator, but the building is accessed by stairs from the street. If you call (212) 534-0880 the day before your visit, the Club can make an elevator available via a walkway on the building’s east side. However, the bathrooms are accessed by three steps.