Sunday Times 2
Our feathered friends who traverse the globe through migration
View(s):Dr Sampath Seneviratne will deliver the WNPS lecture for October on ‘The Greatest Dance on the Planet: a collection of stories of the long-distance migration of birds from our neighbourhood’ on October 17 at 6 p.m. at the Jasmine Hall, BMICH, Colombo 7.
Dr. Sampath Seneviratne with a Banded Bar-tailed Godwit - a rare find in Sri Lanka
Modern aviation and internet had brought communities closer and made the world a smaller place for us. Yet it is perhaps birds that can lay claim to being the first globalizing influence through their ability to traverse the globe through migration.
Through eight distinctive flyways, birds roam across the globe twice a year and perform a spectacular ‘dance’ that no other form of life on earth does in such a grandeur scale. Global trotters of the Central Asian Flyway reach Sri Lanka as its final southern destination.
The cutting edge science armed with novel technologies paint a vibrant story on how they do that. The lecture will highlight some of these novel findings to illustrate how this annual dance is performed to the planet’s cyclic rhythm and tempo in our own backyard.
A research scientist Dr. Sampath S. Seneviratne specialises in the study of evolution, molecular biogeography, and ornithology. His laboratory – Avian Evolution Node – studies how animals evolve in isolation in an island biogeography framework using both field- and laboratory-based research in a broader genes-to-ecosystems approach.
He is the current President of the Field Ornithology Group of Sri Lanka (FOGSL) and the newly formed Sri Lanka Ecological Association (SLEA) and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Zoology and Environment Sciences, University of Colombo.
The WNPS monthly lecture is open to both members and non-members, Entrance free.