Many of us marvel at bird attributes—their color, their songs, their capacity for long prcise migrations, even their sophisticated cognitive abilities. Most of us know much less of how their abilities are produced. I will talk a bit about relations between anatomy and behavior for two brain systems that my students and I have discovered. I’ll describe how this led into wondering about evolution of the brain, and what we’ve found. I’ll end by describing a current comparative project for which we so far have no data—and how this relates to a closing chapter of my career at Cornell.