Birds Up Close with Lorna Gibson: Author Talk and Book Signing

Have you ever wondered how birds work? Lorna Gibson's new book, Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores Their Hidden Wonders, draws on her experience as a professor of engineering at MIT and as a lifelong birder, to describe how birds work from an engineering perspective. Feathers, bones, bills, eggs, flight: all come in for scrutiny, sometimes at the microscopic scale, sometimes at a more macroscopic scale.

Lorna will focus on the microscopic structures in bird bills and tongues which allow woodpeckers to capture insects deep within the holes they drill, hummingbirds to collect nectar from flowers, sandpipers to sense prey in wet sand, and so much more.