The University of Arizona Press
When: Thursday, November 7, 2024
Time: 10 a.m., MST
Where: Garden Pavilion, Tohono Chul, 7366 N Paseo Del Norte, Tucson
Author Theodore H. Fleming will speak about his book, Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants at Tohono Chul in Tucson. His presentation will include his beautiful photographs of birds, bats and the flowers that they pollinate. Fleming spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He now lives in Tucson and is a volunteer at Tohono Chul. His new book will be available for purchase and the author will sign books.
About the book:
Like gems flitting through the sky, hummingbirds attract our eye. But they are more than flash: they are critical pollinators in their ecosystems. Similarly in the darkness of night, nectar-feeding bats perform the same important ecological service as their colorful avian counterparts.
A deeply thoughtful and researched dive into evolutionary history, Birds, Bats, and Blooms offers an engaging trip across evolutionary trajectories as it discusses nectar-feeding birds and bats and their coevolution as pollinators with flowering plants. The primary focus is on New World birds such as hummingbirds and their chiropteran counterparts (nectar-feeding bats in the family Phyllostomidae). It also discusses their Old World ecological counterparts, including sunbirds, honeyeaters, lorikeets, and nectar-feeding bats in the Pteropodidae family. Fleming also addresses the conservation status of these beautiful animals.
