RUTH PADEL
Ruth Padel is a British poet and writer with close connections to conservation, wildlife, Greece and music.
She has published a novel, eight works of non-fiction and eight poetry collections, most recently The Mara Crossing, which mixes poems and prose to explore migration: how cells migrate in our bodies, and animals, birds and people migrate across the globe. She writes and presents BBC Radio 4′s Poetry Workshop on writing poems, in which she works with poetry groups across the UK, as well as being author of Tigers in Red Weather, Darwin – A Life in Poems and Where the Serpent Lives.
Ruth is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Council Member for the Zoological Society of London.
Why these tropical birds? “When I had my tonsils out aged seven I was given a pack of wild animal cards which included four hummingbirds. They have stayed with me ever since. As in Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Birds are all around us, inhabitants of two worlds, land and air, they disappear to other worlds and come back, weaving the world together. but they are also the marker of the health for the environment. I wanted tropical birds for the centre of the world, the centre of biodiversity and these three birds in the Blackburn Pavilion seem to me to encapsulate all that.” – Ruth Padel
Featuring Director of the Institute of Zoology: Professor Tim Blackburn
Professor Tim Blackburn’s research interests encompass a broad range of topics in large-scale ecology and comparative evolutionary ecology. His early work focused on macroecology, including research programs in the causes and consequences of spatial variation in, and interactions between, abundance, geographic distribution and body size in animal assemblages across national to global scales.
While he still maintains an interest in these questions, most of his recent research has addressed the ecology and evolution of invasions, especially the causes of establishment success, and how invasions by exotic organisms (including humans) relate to extinctions of native bird species on oceanic islands. Professor Tim Blackburn is also involved with collaborations on biotic homogenization, comparative physiology and the evolution of egg coloration in birds.
Chaired by Martin Rowson
Martin Rowson is a British cartoonist and novelist. His genre is political satire and his style is scathing and graphic. His work frequently appears in The Guardian and The Independent.
