Wednesday night: Students in Jeopardy

…Jeopardy the quiz show, that is. Wednesday night was the first-ever third-annual (see correction in Comments) Student Quiz Bowl. Nine teams of three graduate students competed in a Jeopardy-style quiz show. Questions were all bird-oriented, covering field identification, videos of behavior to interpret, and anatomy, taxonomy, history, hybridization, physiology, and so on – even a category on names given to gatherings of birds (an exaltation of larks, anyone?).

The overall winners, coincidentally, were a team of former Cornell undergraduates*** who called themselves TCL6 (inspiration for the name is rumored to have come from the e-mail address of a crack birder at the Lab). Some of my favorite answers? (Remember to frame them in the form of a question): What is an Olympic Gull? What is a herd of cranes? What is psittacofulvin? What is a Cape May Warbler (which sounds like an easy one, but the clue was a picture of just the back end of the bird.) Congratulations to all the participants.

Some commenters asked for photos from the floor of the poster show, exposing a key flaw in the Round Robin meeting coverage team: no photographer. But I pulled out my cell phone and managed to get you a couple of pictures of the subterranean poster setup:

Thanks for reading – and if you have any questions or would like to see anything in particular covered, drop me a note in the Comments. The conference is half over, and I’m off to see Dr. Terry Root of Stanford University talk about climate change.

***Congratulations to the members of TCL6: Scott Haber ’07, Ben Winger ’07, and Mike Andersen ’04.