Dr. Wenfei Tong is a research associate at the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and a faculty member at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. She received a bachelor's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton, and a PhD in biology from Harvard.

Her postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge focused on the evolution and genetics of brood parasitic birds - a subject she returns to in this book. At the University of Montana, she has developed citizen science monitoring for threatened grassland birds. Wenfei writes popular science articles for nature nonprofit organizations and contributes to international science journals.

She is a guest lecturer for Lindblad National Geographic Expeditions and runs a nature tour company based in Montana. She lives in Missoula, Montana, USA.Dr. Mike Webster is the Robert G. Engel Professor of Ornithology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at Cornell University, and also Director of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

He has studied the effects of ecological factors on bird breeding behaviour, the ways that sexual selection shapes courtship signals like plumage colour and song and the effects of those signals on the process of speciation. His research focuses primarily on Australian fairy-wrens, North American wood warblers and Neotropical blackbirds.