Tuesday, October 27
Merrymeeting Audubon Presents
The Ivory-billed and the Boreal - Lessons and Legacies
Curtis Memorial Library,
Morrell Room, Brunswick, Maine 7:00 pm
Ornithologist Jeff Wells was a member of Cornell's first top-secret search team that descended on the Arkansas swamps soon after the now-famous report of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in February, 2004. Dr. Wells' search for the thought-to-be-extinct bird was full of excitement and adventure, but it also had a profound influence on his views about bird conservation, especially for America's last great wilderness, the Boreal Forest.
Stretching from Alaska to Newfoundland and encompassing over 1.4 billion acres, the Boreal Forest is the breeding area for as many as three billion birds. This includes many of the best known and best loved of our migrant and wintering birds —Bufflehead, Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, Cape May Warblers, White-throated Sparrows, Rusty Blackbirds—to name a few. The Boreal Forest region of Canada also supplies U.S. consumer demand for cheap tissue paper, newsprint, lumber, and energy—the impetus behind an increasingly unsustainable use of the habitats that boreal birds rely upon.
Dr. Wells will recount his experiences as a member of the Ivory-billedWoodpecker search effort and discuss the lessons we can apply to protecting our last remaining intact ecosystems.
Free and open to the Public. Refreshments.
