Category: Uncategorized

This meeting and presentation took place entirely in person at the Liederkranz Club at 6 East 87^th Street, New York.

The evening began with a reception at 6 pm. This was a members-only event, and it was well-attended by the membership and invited guests. Between members, invited guests, and award winners, around one hundred people began filling the room with the sounds of conversation and laughter, which got louder as more people arrived.

At 7:36 pm, President Debbie Mullins called the Society meeting to order.

President Mullins welcomed the audience to this 147^th annual meeting of the Linnaean Society of New York and thanked all for coming. She noted that the annual meeting gives the president the opportunity to report on the activities of the Society over the past year, and that she would be presenting those as well as the finances of the past year, the nominees for the Society’s board for the new term, 2025/2026, and the recipients of this year’s Society’s awards.

President Mullins made the following remarks:

In Memoriam

• She gave tribute to all the Society members who have recently passed away and the year in which they joined.
• Michael Bonifanti, 2016
• Helen Hays, past president, 1958
• Orlando H. Garrido, Honorary Member, 2010*
• Jean Held, 1977
• Leo Hollein, 2003
• Anthony Lauro, 1968
• Nina Moinester, 2007
• Paul Meyers, 1970
• Bernard Nathan, 1974
• Irene Payne, 1999
• Alison Rea, 2013
• William Riley, 1965*
• Ruby Senie, 2019
• Olaf Soltau, 2016
• Lenore Swenson, fellow, 1994
• Constance Wiley, 2021

*After the annual meeting, the Society’s board learned of their deaths.

• She noted that Helen Hays, who died a few weeks ago, was a former president of the Society. She was a guiding light for the Great Gull Island project over the decades, beginning in the 1960s, and retired only a few years ago. She will be greatly missed.

Annual Report

• The 2024 annual report was distributed to all members in attendance. It contains the secretary’s report and reports from all the Society’s committees. The president encouraged the members to read them.
• Thirty new members joined the Society in 2024, bringing the membership to 767—almost double the number from before the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The requirements that new members be sponsored and approved by a vote of the membership have been discontinued.
• The Society’s fiscal position is strong, with a current balance of $214,000. Last year’s net income was $26,000.
• The board is looking into the logistics of returning to in-person regular member meetings as a hybrid together with remote attendance via Zoom. Numerous members have been expressing their hope for in-person meetings.
• The president presented highlights from each of the committee’s accomplishments over the past year, and thanked the chairs, committee members, and volunteers for their dedication and hard work.
• The president expressed her appreciation and thanks to the outgoing board members whose terms are ending.
• The president mentioned others who have contributed to the Society’s infrastructure, operations, and growth. And she thanked those on the planning committee for arranging this annual meeting.
• She concluded by expressing that it had been a privilege to serve as president for the past two years, and thanked the Society for its support.

Silent Auction and Raffle

• Gillian Henry presented the results of the silent auction, and drew the tickets for the winners of the raffle bags.

Election of Officers, Board Members, and Motions

• Alice Deutsch, Mary Beth Kooper, and Kevin Sisco comprised the committee for nominating officers and board members.
• Thus far, a presidential candidate has not been found, and the search continues for a person who would be interested in filling the role. In the interim, board members and former presidents will share the responsibilities.
• President Mullins then introduced the officers and board members who have been nominated for election.
• Voting will be done online: following the meeting, ballots will be emailed to all members who are up-to-date with their dues. The poll will be open for two days, and close on Thursday, March 13^th, at midnight.

Awards

• Member awards:
  • Peregrine Falcon 50-year Member Award to Paula M. Schutte, who joined the Linnaean Society in 1975.
  • Fellow to Ken Chaya, former president, vice president, board member, and trip leader, who provided a great deal of dedicated service to the Linnaean Society, including during the COVID lockdown, when he kept the Society vibrant and moving forward.
• Linnaean Society of New York awards: The Society presents several awards each year to honor individuals who have made significant contributions to natural history, conservation, and education. President Mullins introduced each honoree and described and recognized their achievements:
  • 2025 Shelda Taylor Award to Jennifer Stalec, a teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School. The award honors K – 12 teachers who have made a sustained and substantial impact by educating their students on aspects of natural history.
  • 2025 Natural History Service Award to Dustin Partridge, director of conservation and science at the NYC Bird Alliance, for his research and expertise on green infrastructure in urban landscapes. This award is given to individuals who, through working with members of the public, have triggered a lasting interest in natural history.
  • 2025 Eisenmann Medal to Bryan D. Watts, the Mitchell A. Byrd Professor of Conservation Biology at the College of William & Mary. He is the founder and director of the Center for Conservation Biology, and the author of over 600 scientific publications. The Eisenmann Medal is the highest award given by the Linnaean Society of New York. It is given to an individual for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur.

Eisenmann Lecture: “Eagles of the Chesapeake,” presented by Dr. Bryan D. Watts

Dr. Watts began his talk with an introduction to the Center of Conservation Biology, a research unit within the College of William and Mary. Its focus is on birds of conservation concern in the Western Hemisphere. The organization has worked on thousands of projects from Argentina to the Arctic, with about 40 field projects per year, many of which are long-term, multi-decade commitments. He then moved on to present three of those projects, starting with the Bald Eagles of Chesapeake Bay.

The Eagles of Chesapeake Bay

In his introductory description of the Chesapeake Bay, Dr. Watts noted that it is one of the great estuaries of the world, with shallow waters and a dendritic shoreline that result in a highly productive habitat, including for fish-eating birds such as the Bald Eagle, Osprey, and Great Blue Heron. It is also an area that is becoming engulfed in the rapid development of the Boston-to-Washington corridor and the Virginia Golden Crescent; the resultant habitat loss is having an impact on these species.

Dr. Watts next talked about the Bald Eagles: their traits as part of the sea eagle subfamily, their habitat needs and preferences, and details about their life cycle, all punctuated with photos from around the Chesapeake Bay. He then moved on to the data, which illustrated the devastating effect of DDT on Bald Eagle populations, with maps of nesting sites around the Chesapeake Bay over time together with bar charts constructed from chronological data of nesting pairs. He described the monitoring methods, which amped up to aerial surveys beginning in 1962, and his own involvement flying as part of a team for over 30 years with the famous Professor Mitchell Byrd, and Captain Fuzzzo (with three “z’s,” with the middle “z” being silent…to spontaneous audience laughter).

With the banning of DDT and the enactment of federal legislation directed at protection of endangered species, the Bald Eagle and Osprey populations have rebounded. Dr. Watts estimates that there are now 3,000 pairs of Bald Eagles in the Chesapeake Bay, up from about 60 to 70 pairs at the height of the DDT period. Osprey pairs have increased from 1,400 to around 12,000, and Great Blue Heron pairs from fewer than 1,000 to now 15,000. Over this time, there was an exponential growth in the birds’ reproduction, reaching a maximum in the late 1990s to early 2000s. Dr. Watts explained that research suggests that since that peak, a negative behavioral feedback loop is now bringing the populations to a new stable level based on territory constraints.

The Chaco Eagle

Dr. Watts introduced the Chaco Eagle (Buteogallus coronatus), which he described as one of the most endangered eagles in the world and one of the least known. It lives in arid habitats in south central South America in Argentina, Paraguay, and southern Brazil. Formerly named Crowned Eagle, it has a small crest of dark, gray feathers. Fifteen years ago the Center of Conservation Biology began assisting in conservation efforts with local researchers in Argentina to protect this eagle. The center provided technology and training to local scientists to learn about the ecology of the eagle, and to understand why it is so endangered.

Included in the information the center learned is that Chaco Eagles’ principal prey are snakes and hairy armadillos; that they seem to produce a single chick per year; that the chick has a long dependency period of 12 months or longer; and that adults are dying at a rapid rate. As to why the adults are dying prematurely, field work has provided answers: 1) electrocution by power lines: rural infrastructure has not been upgraded to raptor-safe, international standards; 2) killing by ranchers: local lore tells of Chaco Eagles preying on lambs—a fiction, as borne out by research and evidence to the contrary.

Addressing the indiscriminate killing of Chaco Eagles, Dr. Watts told us that an outreach and education program was developed and implemented to involve ranchers in the efforts to protect the species. He showed a photograph of himself demonstrating to a rancher how to band a Chaco Eagle. And he emphasized the need for multi-generational participation in these efforts in order to ensure sustainability of the species, showing another photo of a mother introducing her young daughter to a Chaco Eagle in-hand.

Panama City—Remarkable Wetlands, Shorebirds, and Encroaching Development

Dr. Watts concluded his lecture with a topic that he told the audience he had particularly selected to honor Eugene Eisenmann, having to do with Panama and the ecological treasure of the habitat near the Panama Canal.

In 1997, at the time when the United States was handing over control of the Panama Canal Zone to Panama, the State Department asked Dr. Watts to do a rigorous assessment of waterbirds as part of its conservation recommendations to the Panamanians. One location was the shoreline just east of Panama City along the Pacific coast. Dr. Watts described it as a remarkable place, an internationally important area for migratory shorebirds with especially high densities of birds—on the order of 14 birds per meter. In 2008 he returned to Panama with the Center of Conservation Biology to do another survey. He found that the coastal mangrove forests and mudflats to the east of Panama City that they had surveyed in 1997 were being cut down and filled in to build high-rise buildings on this ecologically important terrain.

Dr. Watts honed in on his theme: conservation must be local. And while research is important, conservation requires the commitment of the people who live there. In 1997 Dr. Watts had been concerned that the Panamanian people might not know how globally important the Panamanian Pacific coastline is for migratory shorebirds. At that time he wrote a booklet describing the birds and the importance of the habitat, and printed about 10,000 copies. He handed the booklets over to the Ministry of Education. Ten years later, in a classroom at one of the field sites he was visiting, he noticed one of those booklets tacked onto a bulletin board. And he had noticed over those ten to fifteen years that a national awareness and pride was building about the efforts to support shorebirds. In the early 2000s, the Panama Audubon Society directed their focus to shorebird conservation. To that end, the Center for Conservation Biology has periodically gone down to Panama to support them with equipment and training on shorebird survey techniques, all with the goal of building the capacity for local scientists and volunteers to do the work.

Dr. Watts concluded that conservation requires the commitment of the local area, government entities, corporations, citizens, and citizen groups. And it needs to be multi-generational. We can offer help, but it is those who have the closest, local stake who ultimately will shepherd conservation forward.

At 9:02 pm, following the Q&A session, President Debbie Mullins thanked Professor Watts and adjourned the meeting.

Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary

This meeting and presentation took place entirely online via Zoom.

At 7:00 pm, President Debbie Mullins called the Society meeting to order.

President Mullins made the following announcements:

• She welcomed all to the February meeting of the Linnaean Society of New York.
• She noted that the annual meeting is just four weeks away, on Tuesday, March 11, at the Liederkranz Club on East 87^th Street; it starts at 7:30 pm and is free of charge.
  • The meeting is for members only (those who are up-to-date with their dues).
  • There is still time to become a member in time to join the meeting. The membership application is on the Linnaean website at linnaeannewyork.org under Members/Join.
  • Those who have forgotten to pay their fall dues can pay now in order to attend the meeting.
  • Registration is online at members.linnaeannewyork.org/events
  • There will also be a cocktail reception before the meeting, starting at 6:00 pm. Tickets to the reception are $135 per person.
  • Among the awards being presented at the annual meeting are the following:
    • The Eisenmann Medal, the Society’s highest honor, to Dr. Brian Watts. He will give the keynote address, “Eagles of the Chesapeake”.
    • The Natural History Service Award to Dr. Dustin Partridge, Director of Conservation and Science at the New York City Bird Alliance.
    • The Shelda Taylor Award to Jennifer Stalec, a teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
  • Raffle tickets are $5. There will also be a silent auction with many offerings, including original art work by Alan Messer and a private boat tour of Jamaica Bay led by Don Riepe.
  • Volunteers are still needed for the evening. If you can help, email Debbie Mullins at president@linnaeannewyork.org.
• President Mullins welcomed the following new Linnaean Society members:
  • Joseph McManus
  • Pieter Prall
  • Julia Zichello

At 7:03 pm, President Mullins turned to the lecture program and introduced the speaker, Dr. Wesley Hochachka, senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY. Dr. Hochachka is an ornithologist with a background in field studies of birds and data analysis, and is part of the eBird organization. He has been working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology since 1998.

Lecture: “Informing Basic Science and Conservation with Bird Watchers’ Observations (and Lots of Computers),” presented by Dr. Wesley Hochachka

Dr. Hochachka began his talk with a contextual overview of eBird, the citizen-science tool for worldwide bird data collection of the presence, location, and abundance of individual bird species. He explained that eBird provides the platform and system management support for birders to catalog their observations, and makes those observations available (in many forms) for researchers, organizations, and the general public.

To give a sense of the scope and the range of the data within eBird, Dr. Hochachka gave the most recent number of total checklists submitted as of a few hours before this talk: 111 million. He observed that the data are not evenly distributed around the globe, illustrating with a world map. Not surprisingly, some of the highest concentrations of observations are in North America, parts of Europe, India, and elsewhere that eBird has developed partnerships and where eBird is widely used.

This led to the next important point about eBird data that Dr. Hochachka made: in addition to the enormous amount of eBird being gathered, it is also “noisy,” in part because of the way it is gathered. The signal-to-noise ratio is very low, and methods are needed to identify patterns and trends from the data. Hence, the eBird organization has a data analysis team that works on many aspects of managing the data including: 1) developing methods to interpret them; 2) providing resources, documentation, and software tools for others to work with the data; and 3) conducting analyses using the supercomputer resources of the National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program to provide more manageable information and products.

Dr. Hochachka presented examples of products that eBird is currently producing; those that are in the development stage; and others that are in areas for future work. From the “Status and Trends” project, Dr. Hochachka showed an abundance map and a trends map for Wood Thrush. Both the maps and the data underlying them are available to the public. Under development are “Trajectory” data products that aim to use eBird data to model species year-to-year abundance changes much like the results obtained from breeding bird surveys. Other ongoing projects are tailored for specific studies. Some work involves data analysis collaborations with partners on stewardship projects. Future data coordination and analysis might include audio recording data.

Dr. Hochachka concluded his talk with a set of takeaways about eBird that he wanted to convey to the audience from his perspective as a data analyst:

1. There are lots of data, albeit noisy data.
2. Dealing with the noisiness requires lots of computation.
3. We aim to direct this computation toward the useful goals of partners.
4. eBird should never be considered a universal substitute for rigorously designed surveys.

Following is Dr. Hochachka’s abstract of his talk.

Formal bird monitoring programs, such as the North American Breeding Bird Survey, are invaluable sources of information about where birds live and how their numbers have changed through time. However, the costs of running such programs mean that they cannot be run throughout the year or across very large numbers of locations. The large quantities of information being collected by participatory (or citizen) science projects, most notably by eBird, have the potential to fill in gaps in our knowledge of bird populations. Careful analyses are needed in order to separate changes in bird populations from changes in the behavior of the bird watchers who provide their observations. In his presentation, he will talk about some of the insights into bird populations that have been revealed from eBird’s data and the uses of these insights. Weekly maps of the distributions of birds provide information about areas of concentration and migratory movements, which has been used to design and implement conservation programs and to inform policy decisions. Estimates of local changes in population size (“trend maps”) complement the information provided by the Breeding Bird Survey. He will conclude by describing some of our ongoing and future work, and plans for making the insights from eBird’s data more widely and easily available to a variety of audiences.

At 7:53 pm, Vice President Doug Futuyma hosted the Q&A session.

At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President Futuyma thanked Dr. Hochachka for his presentation, and noted that the number of questions clearly showed a great interest by the many birders who use eBird to understand how it works and what is being done with the data that is collected.

At 8:36 pm the meeting was adjourned.

The presentation has been recorded in its entirety, including the Q&A session and the president’s opening remarks. The recording is available for viewing on the Linnaean Society of New York website under the dropdown menu: Programs/Watch/ and on the Society’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@linnaeanny/videos.

Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary

This meeting and presentation took place entirely online via Zoom.

At 7:00 pm, President Debbie Mullins welcomed the attendees and called the Society meeting to order.

President Mullins made the following announcements:
Membership dues fund the Society’s programs and activities and are the Society’s largest source of income. President Mullins thanked those who have already paid and explained to those who haven’t how they can pay online, or by mailing a check.
New York City Council legislation, Intro 896, (Lights Out bill) is pending. The proposed bill would require privately owned commercial and industrial buildings to turn off nonessential nighttime illumination during peak bird migration. President Mullins encouraged the members of the audience to write or call their city council member to urge sponsorship of this bill. Artificial light is responsible for attracting and disorienting migrating birds, resulting in high mortality from window collisions.

Society members had been asked to vote online on two motions in advance of this meeting:  

Motion 1: Request to approve the minutes of the September, 2024, regular meeting. The minutes were approved by a vote of 128 in favor, four abstaining, and none opposed.

Motion 2: Request to approve the membership applications of ten new members. The new memberships were approved with 131 in favor, one abstaining, and none opposed. President Mullins warmly welcomed the following new members:

• David Berger
• Alison Dundy
• Ann Goodwin
• Stevan Hubbard
• Peggy Maslow
• Joseph Navarro
• Lindsay Drogin
• Nancy Rosenberg
• Susan Klingelhoefer
• Joan Cade

President Mullins again welcomed all the new members to the Linnaean Society, said that she was happy they had joined, and looked forward to meeting them soon. She also invited the non-member attendees to join the Society, explaining that the Society is open to everyone who has an interest in birds or other areas of natural science and that the membership application is on the Society’s website.

At 7:03 pm, President Mullins turned to the lecture program and introduced the speaker, Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist in the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and director of BirdCast—a massive collaborative research and development project working to model the dynamics of bird migration.

Lecture: “Bird Migration in the Era of Big Data: BirdCast Perspectives on the Future of Monitoring Migrating Birds,” presented by Dr. Andrew Farnsworth

This evening’s lecture, like that of last month’s, once again addressed the tragic population loss of nearly three billion birds in North America over the past fifty years.  This time the focus was on the development of quantitative tools—BirdCast, its predecessors, and other methods under development—and their power to better understand bird migration and promote solutions to reverse population declines, particularly in migrating bird species.

Dr. Farnsworth began by giving a historical perspective demonstrating how far we have come in the evaluation of bird migration data. Thanks to technological developments, especially those evolving in the digital age, the amount of bird data has exploded along with analytical abilities to identify patterns, trends, and relationships from enormous quantities of data. He described the first coordinated scientific effort to quantify nocturnal bird migration across the continental United States. During four October nights in the early 1950s, hundreds of observers trained telescopes on the moon and counted the silhouettes of birds. It took almost fifteen years to analyze and publish the results. In addition, early in the development of radar technology it was recognized that birds were being detected on radar scans. Weather radar scans from this period were recorded on 16 mm and 35 mm film. Correlating the moon-watching data with weather surveillance radar data became one of the foundational approaches to the development of the BirdCast bird migration quantification model. Today, computer power, big data analysis techniques, and machine learning are being harnessed to interpret and manage the enormous quantities of data and to present information in close to real-time on the BirdCast platform.

Moving on to BirdCast itself, Dr. Farnsworth presented a map of the United States showing all the weather surveillance radar locations, with weather superimposed and blue blotches (which are the birds) around many of the radar locations. Next he showed an example of a BirdCast live bird migration map recorded on October 6, 2023, at 22:20 ET, and described many of its features. He noted that this particular night marked the largest migration night ever recorded on BirdCast; he hopes that conservation work will cause this number to increase. The migration map he showed was on a continental scale, but BirdCast also provides information at state and county levels; to illustrate, he showed New York County examples from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The 2024 panel was particularly notable. It was from three nights before, on October 5^th, when the largest number of birds yet recorded in the BirdCast/dashboard era occurred in Manhattan, with over one million crossing over the county—an estimated 1,028,300 birds.

From the perspective of bird conservation, one of the powerful outcomes of the BirdCast project has been the ability to reliably forecast bird migration—both the numbers and the locations of where the birds are going to be. This has big implications for reducing bird collisions with buildings and windows—a major cause of the decline in populations of migrating birds. Dr. Farnsworth talked about how lights attract and disorient birds, pointing out that untreated glass can be deadly, but when lights are turned off, typical migration behavior resumes.

BirdCast migration forecasting, in tandem with initiatives for turning out lights on high migration nights, can substantially reduce the number of bird collisions and fatalities, as can bird-safe window designs and retrofits. Dr. Farnsworth cited the example of McCormick Place, an enormous, glass-faced convention center in Chicago along the shoreline of Lake Michigan that is directly on the Mississippi Flyway. For decades, it has been the site of large numbers of bird collisions and resulting deaths, especially during bird migration. A particularly high number of bird fatalities on the night of October 4-5, 2023, received a lot of press. McCormick Place installed bird-safe window film in September, 2024, and now participates in the Lights Out Chicago program, closing drapes at night, and reducing lighting during peak migration periods. Dr. Farnsworth has heard that since these changes were made, the number of collisions has dropped dramatically for the first time in forty years. He cited other examples of successful Lights Outs programs and bird-safe design, and hopes that they will bring an awareness and motivation for bird conservation around the world.

Dr. Farnsworth’s final topic was evolving technologies for using big data in the study of bird migration. He talked about the identification of birds by sound, and collecting and analyzing flight calls of nocturnal migrating birds. He also discussed the potential to use today’s technology to analyze the pre-digital migration radar data from the 1950s and 60s in order to gain more understanding of historical migration: the intensity of migration, where it was occurring, its relationship to weather, and how it has changed. He talked about remote sensing, and how it might be used to understand bird biology and behavior interacting in the atmosphere—for example, when unusual events occur, like hurricane Milton. He also mentioned thermal photography as a way to identify bird migration at night.

And why go to all this effort, gathering all this data, pooling community input, analyzing it all?  The bottom line is that understanding the science allows us to make changes that will reverse this “horrible curve” and thereby increase bird populations.

At 8:00 pm, Vice President Doug Futuyma thanked Dr. Farnsworth for a fantastic talk, saying that it had been amazing. He then hosted the Q&A session.

At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President Futuyma thanked Dr. Farnsworth again for a really, really interesting talk, and at 8:32 pm the meeting was adjourned.

A recording of this meeting in its entirety can be found on the Linnaean Society of New York website.

Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary