Upcoming Programs

We are pleased to announce that Nuttall monthly meetings are back in person at Harvard.

Daniel T. Ksepka--Penguins, Past and Present

April 1, 2024

Curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT

Penguins evolved more than 60 million years ago. The rich fossil record of these birds has revealed unexpected forms such as giant (300lb+) penguins, spear-billed penguins, and penguins with red and grey feathers. These fossils provide a window into how penguins adapted to changing environmental conditions such as drifting continents, reorganization of Southern Ocean currents, and the onset of glacial-interglacial cycles. Increasingly, scientists are combining fossil data with observations from living penguins to gain a synthetic understanding of penguin evolution. In 2022, the complete genomes of all living penguins were sequenced and calibrated with dates from fossils, providing once unimaginable insight into species boundaries, aquatic adaptations to everything from vision to metabolism, and population expansions and crashes during the last Ice Age.

Dr. Daniel T. Ksepka is a Curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT and also holds Research Associate positions at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History. Dr. Ksepka earned his BS from Rutgers University and a PhD from Columbia University. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed research articles as well as numerous popular articles for venues such as Scientific American and American Scientist. His research focuses on avian phylogeny and anatomy, with a special interest in penguins. Dr. Ksepka has collected penguin fossils in Peru and New Zealand, named 11 extinct penguins species including the 340lb giant penguin Kumimanu fordycei, and participated in the recent sequencing of the complete genomes of all 19 living penguin species.

 

Allison J. Shultz--Flashy feathers to microscopic mechanisms: How and why birds are colorful

May 6, 2024

Associate Curator, Ornithology, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Join Associate Curator of Ornithology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as she delves into the world of feathers and their colors. During her talk, she will discuss why color needs to be studied from a bird's perspective rather a human one, and how different forces have shaped the multitude of colors and patterns that we observe today (including some that humans can't see!). She will end her talk by describing some of her current work on the mechanisms underlying the great diversity of colors in birds.

Dr. Allison Shultz is Associate Curator of the Ornithology Department at NHMLAC. With her research, she seeks to understand the evolution of bird diversity, focusing on two major areas: how birds are responding to human-caused environmental changes, and how and why bird colors evolve. Dr. Shultz received her PhD from Harvard University, MS from San Diego State University, and BA from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her research, Dr. Shultz is passionate about increasing diversity, inclusion, access, and equity in the sciences, and inspiring a love of nature in everyone.

 

 

Martin Wikelski--ICARUS – A new global IoT system for tracking movements of small migratory birds

June 3, 2024

Director, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

The collective wisdom of the Earth´s animals provides an immense bio-treasure of unprecedented information for humankind. Learning from animals in the ´Internet of Animals´ can help us predict natural catastrophes, forecast global zoonotic disease spreads or safeguard food resources while monitoring in situ every corner of the planet. The evolved senses of animals as well as technical sensors on animal-borne tracking tags enables local earth observations at highest spatial and temporal resolution. To protect and understand the ecosystem services provided by animals, we need to monitor individual animals seamlessly on a global scale. At the same time, these unprecedented life-history data of individual wild animals provide deep, novel insight into fundamental biological processes.

The ICARUS initiative, an international bottom-up, science-driven technology development of small, cheap and autonomous IoT (Internet of Things) sensing devices for animal movement and behavior is aiming towards this: wearables for wildlife. The resulting big data available in the open-source data base Movebank help understand, monitor, predict and protect life on our planet.

Martin Wikelski is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly Ornithology) in Radolfzell (Germany), Professor in Biology at the University of Konstanz and member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Previously, he held positions at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Princeton University. His specialization is the study of global animal movement.

 

 

 

Past Programs

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John Fitzpatrick – Reflections on American Ornithology, Past, Present, and Future

October 1, 2012

John Fitzpatrick became the Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in August 1995. He received his BA from Harvard in 1974 and a PhD from Princeton in 1978. From 1988 to 1995, John was executive director and senior research biologist at the Archbold Biological Station. From 1978 to 1988 he was…

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Richard L. Soffer, MD – Collecting Ornithological Books: A Personal Odyssey

June 4, 2012

Richard Soffer, retired professor of Molecular Biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, collected a remarkable and extensive series of ornithological books that span the centuries from the late Renaissance to modern times, with particular attention to works that feature the various methods and techniques that have been used to reproduce…

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Edson Endrigo – Endemic, Endangered and Elusive Birds of Brazil

May 7, 2012

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Edson Endrigo started to watch birds at an early age on his grandfather’s farm. He has been a professional bird photographer since 1995, specializing in rare, threatened or little known species. Edson has successfully published nine photographic books of birds of various regions of Brazil. He started his career as…

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Denver Holt – Breeding Ecology of Snowy Owls

April 2, 2012

Denver Holt, a graduate of the University of Montana, is founder and president of the Owl Research Institute (ORI), a nonprofit organization located in Charlo, Montana. A dedicated field researcher in North and Central America, Holt believes that long-term field studies are the primary means to understanding trends in natural history. In 2000, he was…

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Alexander (“Sasha”) Keyel – Habitat Selection in Grassland Birds

March 5, 2012

Alexander “Sasha” Keyel protects birds and the places they live. With the possible exception of Homer Simpson, there are few people who can say that doughnuts played an important role in their lives. Sasha is one of these people. “Growing up, my father would take my siblings and me bird watching,” says Keyel, a Tufts biology…

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Richard Crossley – Past, Present and Future—A Story Told in a Yorkshire Brogue Through a Camera Lens that Loves Color and Art

February 6, 2012
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Mark A. Pokras – Birding with a Wildlife Veterinarian

January 9, 2012

As head of the Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine’s Wildlife Clinic, environmental crusader Mark Pokras teaches his students to view veterinary medicine through a conservation lens – and to communicate the message that human, animal and environmental health are interlinked.

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Mark Faherty – The Cape Cod Osprey Project: Voyeuristic Citizen Science

December 5, 2011

Mark Faherty has been the Science Coordinator at Massachusetts Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary since August of 2007. While his current projects involve everything from oysters and horseshoe crabs to bats and butterflies, he has studied primarily bird ecology for the last 16 years, working on research projects in Texas, Florida, California, Arizona, Mexico, the…

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Andrés Bosso – Aves Argentinas: 95 Years of Protecting Birds and their Habitats in the Other Side of the Americas

October 3, 2011

Andrés Bosso has been working on behalf of bird conservation for more than 25 years. In 1996 he began working for Aves Argentinas, a partner of BirdLife International. From 1996 to 2010 he was the CEO of this prestigious NGO, which was founded in 1916. Bosso is a member of the Global Council of BirdLife…

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Lisa Sorenson – Conservation in the Caribbean: Challenges, Successes and Urgent Needs

June 6, 2011

Lisa Sorenson, Research Assistant and Professor of Biology at Boston University and President, West Indian Whistling-Duck Working Group of the Society of Caribbean Ornithology, received her PhD in conservation biology, behavioral ecology, and hormonal mechanisms of behavior in birds at University of Minnesota in 1990. Sorenson’s recent research addresses the potential effects of global warming…

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Bret Whitney – Birds of Brazil and Peru: New Birds and Old Places

May 2, 2011

Bret Whitney is one of the founders of Field Guides, a Research Associate of the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, an Associate of the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell, 2004 recipient of the ABA’s Ludlow Griscom award, and an eternal optimist about everything except Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Bret guides many Brazil tours and,…

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Ted Floyd – Birding at Night

April 4, 2011

Ted Floyd is the Editor of Birding, the flagship publication of the American Birding Association. He has published widely on birds and ecological topics. Ted has written more than 125 articles, with contributions to scholarly journals such as Ecology, Oecologia, Animal Behaviour, Journal of Animal Ecology, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution and contributions to…

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Scott Weidensaul – Birds of a Feather

March 7, 2011

Born in 1959, Scott Weidensaul has lived almost all of his life among the long ridges and endless valleys of eastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the central Appalachians, a landscape that has defined much of his work. His writing career began in 1978 with a weekly natural history column in the local newspaper, the…

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Kurk Dorsey – Of Mallards and Men

February 7, 2011

Kurk Dorsey, Associate Professor of History, University of New Hampshire, received his BA at Cornell University, his MA at Northwestern University and his PhD at Yale. His current fields of research are US foreign policy, environmental history and history of Canada. Professor Dorsey approaches the history of the environmental movement’s signal law, the migratory bird…

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Joey Mason – Kestrels and Cranberries

January 3, 2011

Joey Mason is a master bander who has been involved in several raptor-related projects over the years. She has been researching Eastern Bluebirds, Tree Swallows, and American Kestrels around cranberry bogs in southeastern Massachusetts since 1989.

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Henry Lumsden – Restoration of Trumpeter Swans

December 6, 2010

Henry Lumsden was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and grew up in Aberdeenshire. He joined the RAF in 1941 were he was trained as a pilot and served as a flying instructor. After the war he joined the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests (later renamed Ministry of Natural Resources) as a biologist. He has intensely…

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Drew Wheelan – Beyond Deepwater: Examining the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the Lessons Learned

November 1, 2010

Drew Wheelan, who grew up in southern Rhode Island, graduated from Evergreen State College in 1996 and since then has worked with birds throughout the United States, Amazonian Peru and Ecuador, as well as Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico. A fight with a life threatening illness lent to him a fresh perspective on life and…

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Alvaro Jaramillo – Birds, Birding, and the Field Guide to Chile

October 4, 2010

Alvaro (Al) Jaramillo was born in Chile but began birding in Toronto, Canada, where he lived as a youth. He studied ecology and evolution in Toronto and Vancouver, earning a masters degree studying co-evolution in Argentine cowbirds. Research forays and backpacking trips introduced Alvaro to the riches of the Neotropics, where he has traveled extensively.…

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Joan Walsh – Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas II

June 7, 2010

Joan Walsh is the Coordinator of the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas 2, and has been working with Mass Audubon since 2006. Her interests are in the interaction between landscapes and bird communities, and in bird breeding behavior. During the 1990s Joan was the Director of Research at New Jersey Audubon Society where she coordinated their…

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David Bird – The American Kestrel: The White Mouse for Raptor Research?

May 3, 2010

Professor of Wildlife Biology and Director of the Avian Science and Conservation Centre of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Dr. DavidBird’s main research interest is focused on raptorial birds, which encompasses virtually all aspects of their biology. He has at his disposal a captive colony of 200 or more American Kestrels. He collaborates with other scientists…

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