Paul C. Mundinger, 1934–2011

Abstract

Paul C. Mundinger, a distinguished scientist and a friend of many of us who are interested in the study of vocal learning in birds, died in Rye, New York, on November 10, 2011. Paul was born on October 12, 1934, in Highland Park, Illinois. As a boy, Paul had a passion for the lives of animals, and while spending time outdoors he developed a quiet patience and keen sense of observation. He particularly enjoyed watching birds, and fishing—especially onWisconsin lakes. He lived a fun and rather wild youth, especially during the summers when he lived in North Dakota with his grandparents, driving a car and working full-time at a summer resort when he was only 15. His father, a very conservative but deeply intellectual Lutheran minister, could never understand why his son came to accept evolution and ultimately devoted his life to its study. Paul received his B.S. in 1956 and M.S. in 1958, both from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D., under Bill Dilger, from Cornell University in 1967. Dilger, an early pioneer in the evolution of behavior, is best remembered for his work on the heritability of nesting habits in lovebirds. The development and evolution of learned behavior came of age as a scientific pursuit in the 1950s, when bird song was developed as a model system by two Europeans, Holger Poulsen in Denmark and William H. Thorpe in England. They took advantage of a new instrument, the sound spectrograph, which converted sounds into a visual display. This display allowed many frequency and timing features of sound to be analyzed in great detail. This technology prompted wonderful work that used birds to study basic issues about vocal learning, many of which were relevant not only to birds but also to humans. W. H. Thorpe used the new tool to make the first detailed description of vocal learning in a songbird, the Chaffinch. Thorpe showed that, as in humans, vocal imitation in this bird occurred particularly well in juveniles. Moreover, when sounds were played over a speaker, young Chaffinches imitated the songs of their own kind but disregarded those of other songbirds. That is, they had a bias to learn Chaffinch song. Inheritance shapes learning. Paul stepped into this rich emerging field in 1967 when he joined the laboratory of Peter Marler at The Rockefeller University in New York. Marler had trained under Thorpe in Cambridge and was a leader of the new integrative biological study of learning. At that time, Rockefeller shared with the New York Zoological Society a research facility at the Bronx Zoo.When Paul became a postdoctoral fellow in the Marler Laboratory, he used this joint facility and Marler’s sound spectrograph to study how cardueline finches (small songbirds such as the American Goldfinch and Pine Siskin) used their vocal learning skills. He found that these birds, as adults, could closely imitate the calls of a new mate or the calls of other members of a winter flock, and that they also responded preferentially to playbacks of these calls. This work, published in 1970 in Science, was an elegant example of vocal learning plasticity that persisted into adulthood. Its function, Paul suggested, was to strengthen social bonds. That same year, Paul joined the Biology faculty at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he conducted two main research programs over the next 40 years. Throughout his career he was extraordinarily dedicated to his questions, passionate to discover the