Lecture 6 - Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication Featured Speaker: Barbara Ballentine, Ph.D.; Associate Professor; Western Carolina University Date: Thursday, July 20th Time: 6pm – 7pm Cost: FREE Sponsored by Miriam & Vernon Skiles and Mary Todd & Jimmy Davis. Birds use acoustic, visual, and even olfactory signals in social contexts that are important for successful reproduction and survival. Signaling works because it offers advantages to both the sender and receiver. Understanding how signals are used by birds to communicate provides insight into the amazing lives of birds.

Lecture 7 - Sounds Wild and Broken Featured Speaker: David George Haskell, Ph.D.; Author and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor; University of the South Date: Thursday, July 27th Time: 6pm – 7pm Cost: FREE Sponsored by Rosemary & Bill Stiefel. Sonic communication was a late-comer to the evolution of life on Earth. But once song got started, the links that it forged became powerful generative forces. Today, the diverse sounds around us – from chirping crickets, to birdsong, to the human music in our earbuds – reveal the many layers of this evolutionary and cultural creativity. Yet sonic diversity is also threatened worldwide. Using examples from his own explorations of sound, Haskell will show how attention to the sensory richness of the world, especially its sonic dimensions, can root and guide exploration, ethics, and action.

Lecture 8 - Archaeoastronomy in Southwestern North Carolina Featured Speakers: Jane M. Eastman, Ph.D.; Associate Professor; Anthropology and Sociology Department; Western Carolina University & Brett Riggs, Ph.D.; Sequoyah Distinguished Professor of Cherokee Studies; Western Carolina University Date: Thursday, August 3rd Time: 6pm – 7pm Cost: FREE Sponsored by Suzanne & Don Duggan, Julie Farrow, Florence & Tom Holmes, Ruthie & Franko Oliver, Adele & Nick Scielzo, and Margaret Waters. In ancient Cherokee perspective, the matters of this world, the Above World and the Beneath World intertwine, and Cherokee peoples constructed ritual landscapes to engage the beings and forces of these realms. Recent investigations in the Little Tennessee River Valley have revealed one such landscape that marks astronomical phenomena and bespeaks sophisticated systems for measuring calendrical time and the cycles central to Cherokee life. These patterns indicate complex observational sciences that guided functions of indigenous societies long before European contact.

Lecture 9 - South Carolina’s Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area Featured Speaker: Tim Lee; Interpretive Ranger/Naturalist; Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area Date: Thursday, August 10th Time: 6pm – 7pm Cost: FREE Sponsored by Martha & Michael Dupuis, Monte & Palmer Gaillard, and Melanie & Tom Mauldin. Located in an area along the Blue Ridge Escarpment, the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area provides a habitat for a diversity of biological communities adapted for life along the Blue Ridge Escarpment. With high average rainfall, diverse topography, and miles of streams and rivers many species found there are rare within the state and some are found in few other places in the world.