After graduating from Harvard, where she studied art and biology, Julie Zickefoose worked for six years as a field biologist for The Nature Conservancy. She is now a columnist (Birdwatcher’s Digest), blogger (three a week, averaging about 24,000 hits each), lecturer, wildlife rehabilitator, bird tour leader, artist and author of several books, and she recently completed a five-year stint as a monthly commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The American Ornithologists’ Union and the Academy of Natural Sciences chose her as one of the primary illustrators of their 17-volume The Birds of North America. Her talk is based on her latest book, of the same title, which is illustrated by 320 of her pencil drawings and watercolors, about which Scott Weidensaul says in his Foreward, “More than almost any other contemporary artist, Zick has the ability to capture the spark of the living creature — the gift for translating motion and color into line and form while retaining the essence of the bird.” The book is likely the only nature book ever to have been reviewed favorably in the New York Review of Books (by Linnaean past president Robert O. Paxton) and to have been chosen Book of the Week by Oprah Winfrey. Ms. Zickefoose writes, “The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds is about what happens when, by virtue of raising it when it’s orphaned or helping it when it’s hurt, you are taken into the confidence of a wild bird. It’s about the unexpected mental and emotional capacities of birds, especially songbirds, which we tend to underestimate and overlook. Everyone knows that crows, ravens and parrots are intelligent, but have you thought about hummingbirds? I have a unique perspective, having been mother to six. And chimney swifts, cedar waxwings, mourning doves, cardinals and rose-breasted grosbeaks, to name a few. Join me for an intimate, eye-opening look at the rich mental and emotional landscape of birds.”
