Facebook Live-Streamed at www.facebook.com/viterboethics

The D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership lecture series will present a Facebook-streamed talk by UW-Madison Professor Lauren Riters titled “Why do birds sing?”

Aldo Leopold wrote and spoke of listening for the first bird songs of a dawning day as in his essay, “The Choral Copse” in the Almanac. But almost a century later the question of why birds sing is still a puzzle according to Riters, Professor of Behavior Neuroscience at UW-Madison. Riters received a PhD in Psychology in the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Bowling Green State University where she studied how birds migrate and return home from distant locations. This was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Liege in Belgium and at The Johns Hopkins University where she began to study how and why birds sing.

Leopold, a conservationist, forester, philosopher, educator, writer, and outdoor enthusiast, is considered by many as the father of wildlife management and of the United States ’wilderness system. He died in 1948 fighting a neighbor's grass fire at "the shack," his family getaway on the Wisconsin River near Portage. Since 2004 the state has designated the first weekend in March as a time to honor Leopold and his conservation legacy. According to the Leopold Foundation, that legacy is "to inform and inspire us to see the natural world 'as a community to which we belong.'” The La Crosse event is planned each year by representatives of local environmental and conservation groups.