Robert B. Payne

Robert Berkeley Payne (born July 24, 1938 in Niles , Michigan ) is an American ornithologist .

Life

After two years at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis , Maryland , Payne moved to the University of Michigan , where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1960 . In 1965 he was with the dissertation The Breeding Seasons and Reproductive Physiology of Tricolored Blackbirds and Red-winged Blackbirds led by Alden Holmes Miller for Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley . This work was published as a book in 1969. From 1965 to 1967 he was a postdoc and research fellow at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town . From 1967 to 1970 he was an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma . In 1970 Payne joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as an assistant professor and assistant curator, where he was promoted to associate professor and assistant curator in 1973, and to full professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biologist and curator at the Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) in 1982. In 2007 Payne retired as professor emeritus and curator.

Payne's research focuses on the social behavior and systematics of birds, particularly the parasitic parasites (those that lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species) and their hosts. For many years he carried out field studies of brood parasites and their hosts in Africa, Australia and North America, including over 20 years of population studies in Michigan on the indigo finch and a brood parasite , the brown-headed cowbird . Payne examined aspects of behavioral expression, behavioral shaping, sexual selection, and song learning in numerous bird host and parasite systems. He complemented the fieldwork with detailed, long-term, cross-functional experiments conducted in his aviaries at the University of Michigan to understand behavior and song development in a wide variety of parasitic birds. Payne also used molecular genetic data sets to determine and compare the phylogenies of host and parasitic birds, as well as to assess their mechanisms and speciation rates. In 1982 Payne first described the Jambandu widow ( Vidua raricola ), the Barka widow ( Vidua larvaticola ) and the Jos plateau widow ( Vidua maryae ), in 1998 the rock amaranth ( Lagonosticta sanguinodorsalis ) and in 1973 the subspecies Vidua chalybeata okavangoensis of the rofoot widow .

Payne taught courses in animal behavior, biology and ornithology. As curator for birds at the Zoological Museum, he was responsible for building up and expanding the collections. He was the dissertation advisor to 16 doctoral students and served on many committees and faculties.

Payne's best-known books include The Cuckoos , a standard work on the cuckoo , which was published in 2005 in the Bird Families of the World series by Oxford University Press . In 1979 he wrote the section on the heron family (Ardeidae) in the Check-list of Birds of the World by Ernst Mayr and George William Cottrell . In 1991 he wrote the chapter on finches with Anthony H. Bledsoe in the Encyclopedia of Birds (German: Enzyklopädie der Vögel, 1999) by Joseph Michael Forshaw and David Kirshner. In 1997 he wrote the chapter on the cuckoo family in the fourth volume of the Handbook of the Birds of the World . In 2003 he wrote the chapter on widow birds (Viduidae) in the seventh volume of the encyclopedia The Birds of Africa .

Payne is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Ornithological Society, and the American Society of Naturalists .

Awards

Payne was honored with the William Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1988 and the Literature, Science and Arts Award from the University of Michigan in 1998. He is a two-time winner of the Cooper Ornithological Society's Painton Award (1975 and 1995) and the 2007 Cooper Ornithological Society's Loye and Alden Miller Research Award. In 2010 he was awarded the Margaret Morse Nice Medal by the Wilson Ornithological Society.

Fonts (selection)

• The birds of mopane woodland and other habitats of Hans Merensky Nature Reserve, Transvaal, South Africa , 1968
• Breeding seasons and reproductive physiology of tricolored blackbirds and redwinged blackbirds , 1969
• Behavior, mimetic songs and song dialects, and relationships of the parasitic indigobirds (vidua) of Africa , 1973
• Systematics and evolutionary relationships among the herons (Ardeidae) , 1976
• Song Mimicry and Species Relationships among the West African Pale-Winged Indigobirds , 1976
• Population structure and social behavior: Models for testing the ecological significance of song dialects in birds , 1976
• Behavior and Songs of Hybrid Parasitic Finches , 1980
• Species limits in the indigobirds (Ploceidae, Vidua) of West Africa Mouth mimicry, song mimicry, and description of new species , 1982
• A distributional checklist of the birds of Michigan , 1983
• Sexual selection, lek and arena behavior, and sexual size dimorphism in birds , 1984
• Populations and type specimens of a nomadic bird: Comments on the North American Crossbills Loxia pusilla Gloger 1834 and Crucirostra minor Brehm 1845 , 1987
• Natal Dispersal and Population Structure in a Migratory Songbird: The Indigo Bunting , 1991
• Indigo Bunting: Passerina cejanea , 1992
• Field observations, experimental design, and the time and place of learning bird songs , 1997
• Begging for Parental Care from Another Species: Specialization and Generalization in Brood-Parasitic Finches , 2002
• Nestling mouth markings and colors of old world finches Estrildidae: mimicry and coevolution of nesting finches and their Vidua brood parasites , 2005
• Bird Families of the World: The Cuckoos , 2005

literature

• Anonymous: William Brewster Memorial Award, 1988 (PDF; 61 kB) The Auk, Vol 106, No. 2, 1989
• Anonymous: Loye and Alden Miller Research Award , The Condor 109, The Cooper Ornithological Society, 2007, pp. 991-994
• Robert B. Payne. American Men & Women of Science: A Biographical Directory of Today's Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences, Gale, 2008. Biography In Context, Online , accessed January 28, 2019.