(Note: This meeting and presentation took place online, via Zoom platform technology, due to social-distancing protocols prompted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.)
At 7:00 pm, President Ken Chaya called the meeting of the Society to order. He introduced himself and thanked the attendees for joining the meeting. Referencing an email sent to members about potential wine-pairings for the evening’s lecture, “Winemakers’ Wingmen: How Birds and Farmers Can Help Each Other,” he toasted the audience with his own glass of wine.
Commencing with the business portion of the meeting, President Chaya announced the result of an online vote to approve the minutes of the September members’ meeting: it passed with 141 votes of approval, none of disapproval, and no abstentions.
Next, he announced the result of an online vote on the approval of new members. It passed with 142 votes of approval and none of disapproval. President Chaya welcomed the following ten individuals as new members:
- Evelyn Huang, sponsored by Chuck McAlexander
- Maria King, sponsored by Karen Askew
- Laurel Fay, sponsored by Mary Beth Kooper
- Ellen Yamaguchi, sponsored by Alice Deutsch
- Nick Dawson, sponsored by Barbara Saunders
- Tara C. Craig, sponsored by Amanda Bielskas
- Justin Koplin, sponsored by Miriam Rakowski
- Adriana Dinu, sponsored by Mary Beth Kooper
- Ellen Jaffe, sponsored by John Wittenberg
- Debby Goldman, sponsored by Alice Deutsch
Stating there were 138 votes of approval and none of disapproval, he announced the results of a recent vote by members to appoint the following nine nominees as Directors of the Linnaean Society of New York Ltd:
- Sherry Felix, Mary Jane Kaplan, and D. Bruce Yolton as Directors Class 1 (term ending 2022)
- Mary Beth Kooper, Vicki Seabrook, and Michelle Zorzi as Directors Class 2 (term ending 2023)
- Marie-Claire Cunningham, Ursula Mitra, and Lydia Thomas as Directors Class 3 (term ending 2024)
He also explained that the officers of the previously unincorporated LSNY immediately became ex-officio directors once the incorporation process was concluded.
President Chaya then invited non-members in attendance to join the Society, explaining that they could learn how to do so by visiting the LSNY website, www.linnaeannewyork.org. He also pointed out that he or any of the other LSNY officers listed on the website would be willing to sponsor anyone who would like to join, emphasizing that an organization is only as healthy as its growing and diverse membership. He declared that the LSNY welcomes all to become members regardless of race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, background, ability, or geographic location.
As the final item of business, President Chaya announced the Society’s need for volunteers, referencing his recent email communication asking for additional field trip registrars. He asked all to consider supporting the organization by volunteering to be trip registrars. He also announced that LSNY is seeking the assistance of someone with technical expertise related to combining in-person speaker meetings with live-streaming Zoom broadcasts, which will be needed once in-person meetings resume at the American Museum of Natural History.
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At 7:10 pm, President Chaya introduced the evening’s speaker, Sara Kross, Ph.D., a conservation biologist and agroecologist who has spent more than a decade conducting research into the complex interactions between wildlife and people in agricultural landscapes. Sara completed her Ph.D. at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and was a founding member of the Marlborough Falcon Conservation Trust in New Zealand. Born in New York, she moved back to the U.S. as a David H. Smith Conservation Postdoctoral Fellow in California and is now a faculty member at Columbia University, where she works with students conducting research projects on snow geese, feral cats, ocelots, dolphins, ticks, and mountain lions.
Her talk was titled “Winemakers’ Wingmen: How Birds and Farmers Can Help Each Other.” Today, agricultural regions have the largest footprint of any terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. These vast landscapes are often thought to be devoid of wildlife, but they can and should sustain diverse and abundant populations of wildlife, especially birds. As stewards of their land, farmers have the ability to engage in management practices that boost avian diversity. However, tight economic conditions and a general wariness of welcoming wildlife to farms means that many farmers do not or cannot utilize those practices. Dr. Kross discussed the complex relationships between farmers and birds and the ways management practices can boost avian diversity, sharing case studies based on her extensive research on New Zealand falcons, North American songbirds, and barn owls living on farms that produce wine grapes, milk, and vegetables.
Dr. Kross opened her talk by acknowledging the many students and colleagues who have supported her work, as well as by thanking the institutions and other supporters that have funded it.
She stated that “agricultural expansion and intensification is the greatest extinction threat to birds,” and shared the following quote from Aldo Leopold in “The River of the Mother of God”: “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.” She described agroecology as the melding of two fields: biodiversity conservation and agriculture.
She then discussed her research and field work in both New Zealand and central California. Her work in New Zealand involved re-introducing the New Zealand Falcon to the vineyards of Marlborough, the country’s largest wine-growing region. In California, she has been studying whether Barn Owls can provide viable pest control for farming. Finally, she has also tried to quantify the damaging effects on crops from birds and insects as a result of birds foraging in California’s Central Valley.
Dr. Ross introduced her talk about her Ph.D. research in New Zealand with a discussion of its formation as a distinct geographic entity. When the supercontinent Gondwanaland broke apart beginning tens of millions of years ago, the section that formed New Zealand had no existing land mammals. Included in the unique flora and fauna that has since evolved there are several ground-nesting bird species, such as the flightless Kakapo, the Tieke, (of which only 650 still exist), and the Kaki (only 170 wild adults remaining). These birds are now facing a crisis due to the introduction ofground mammal predators, against which they have evolved no protections.
Her research focused on the New Zealand Falcon, also known as the Karearea, a ground-nesting bird that is endemic to New Zealand and nationally threatened. Historically, this species ranged from the mountains to the sea but is now found only in the highlands, where their numbers have been dropping. Her goal was to determine if reintroducing individual falcons from the hills of Marlborough into vineyards would be mutually beneficial to the falcons and the winemakers who have struggled with the destruction of their grapes by hungry songbirds. The primary culprits, the European Starling, the Eurasian Blackbird, and the Song Thrush (all introduced from Europe), all like to pluck grapes off the clusters, leaving very little behind.
After the successful translocation of falcons, she found that the vineyards with falcons had 78.4% fewer Song Thrushes, 82.5% fewer Eurasian Blackbirds, and 79.2% fewer European Starlings than those with no falcons. Also, falcons consumed more introduced birds and fewer endemic birds than expected.
Her models found that the vineyards with falcons had 95% fewer removed grapes and 55% fewer pecked grapes. Land value was estimated to be increased by $234 per hectare for sauvignon blanc grapes and $326 per hectare for pinot noir grapes.
As for the falcons, she found that egg depredation in the highlands was 63.2%, but only 38.1% in the vineyards. One of the major predators of falcon eggs, the stoat, is found only in the high country. Viewed in a variety of ways, falcons appeared to be no worse off in intensive vineyards.
Dr. Kross stated that the Marlborough Falcon Trust does captive breeding as well as education and outreach, and all falcons now used in vineyards are rehabilitated and un-releasable birds.
She then turned to her post-doctoral work in California. Farmers in the Central Valley have constructed nest boxes to increase Barn Owl populations, because they think they help control pests. Here, her research involved determining whether this is the case.
She first looked at the owls’ diet and found that 99.5% of their prey items were agricultural pests. She also found that Barn Owls were keeping prey below carrying capacity, and that high densities of owls can almost eliminate these pests.
She expressed concern about secondary poisoning, as 65% of Barn Owl carcasses contained anti-coagulant rodenticides. We still have little understanding of sublethal exposure rates in wild living raptor populations. Her group got funding from the USDA for a multi-year study of rodenticide exposure in raptors’ blood in different seasons, and in diurnal vs. nocturnal raptors, but results are not yet available.
If agriculture were considered its own ecosystem, it would be the largest biome on the plant. Agricultural expansion means habitat fragmentation. As agriculture intensifies, there are increases in chemical inputs, soil erosion, and climate change; in addition, agriculture uses over 70% of the planet’s accessible fresh water. This can lead to both a decrease in biodiversity and an increase in pest survival as crop yield increases. As an example, she cited the decline in North American avifauna: today there are three billion fewer birds than there were in the 1970s. Many of these declines were linked to agricultural practices.
Dr. Kross then talked about her research in California’s Central Valley around the practices farmers can use to improve conservation and productivity. The Central Valley is a hyper-productive landscape—the “salad bowl of North America. One-third of the produce grown in the United States is from the Central Valley, which produces over 230 different crops. All the farmers she encountered seemed to want to support nature on their farms, but they have to think of their bottom lines. So they need to see the benefits of improving conservation on their land. In her research, she looked at patch quality, patch size, and patch isolation. In one experiment using alfalfa, avian species richness was higher with smaller patch size and complexity. Adding hedgerows, or any kind of woody margin, to the edges of farmland increased bird abundance. She found that more birds and more bird diversity reduce insect pest abundance by 33%.
She ended her talk by speaking of farmland’s critical role in biodiversity and saying, “You cannot call agriculture “sustainable” if you don’t incorporate native habitat on farmland.”
At 8:03 pm, former Vice President Rochelle Thomas (filling in for Vice President Gabriel Willow) thanked Dr. Kross for her talk and facilitated the Q&A portion of the program.
At 8:19 pm, former Vice President Thomas passed the floor back to President Chaya, who also thanked the speaker, as well as the audience, and invited viewers to return for the next speaker program on November 9.
8:20 pm—The meeting was adjourned.
Respectfully submitted by Amy Simmons, Recording Secretary