At the Annual Meeting and Dinner, Peter Harrison will receive the Eisenmann Medal, the Linnaean Society’s highest award, given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur. Peter Harrison, a professional birder, artist, author, and screenwriter, is widely considered as one of the world’s foremost authorities on seabirds. Having seen all but one of the world’s 350 or so seabirds, Harrison has written and illustrated over a dozen books of which his Seabirds: An Identification Guide is considered to be the bible of seabird identification. Described as the best bird guide of any kind or of any generation when first published in 1983, it was awarded the “Best Bird Book of the Year” award by the prestigious journal British Birds. Even today, thirty-three years after its publication, it is regarded as the standard work on the seabirds of the world. More recently Harrison has been engaged as consultant and screenwriter in the production of such well-known BBC television series as Life in the Freezer and The Blue Planet. An ardent conservationist, Harrison has helped raise millions of dollars for such important conservation projects as the “Save the Albatross” campaign and rat and mouse eradication projects at South Georgia, Henderson Island, and Gough Island. We invite you to join Peter Harrison for his presentation: “Seven Years and Seven Continents.” Complemented by images from areas as diverse as the Antarctic with its penguins to the Tuareg warriors of the Sahara and the outback of Australia, Harrison’s talk unfolds as a series of adventures spanning seven years of fact-finding and research behind his award-winning Seabirds: An Identification Guide. Punctuated with humor and anecdotal stories and illustrated by superb original research images, his lecture begins with an overland journey from London to Cape Town and then on to Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. This inspirational story is not about being the best, but simply doing your best.
