All Due Respect
NEARLY A DECADE AGO, ornithologist Ruth Bennett was living in Honduras studying the Golden-winged Warbler, a declining and little-understood species, when she noticed a surprising pattern. The birds near her host university were mostly females. The males, with their distinctive black bibs and brighter golden crowns, congregated farther up the mountain, in humid, dense forest. But without more rigorous data, the conservation plan she co-wrote didn’t account for the distinct winter haunts of males and females in its maps of their habitat.
Her observation mattered even more
