The Naturalists' Club of Broome County, NY

Thousands of carefully laid up piles of stones are scattered across the hillsides of southern New York and northern Pennsylvania. They were built by human hands sometime after the glaciers retreated north more than 12,000 years ago. When they were made, who made them, and why they were constructed are questions that do not have definite answers. Dolores Elliott encountered a site in 1966 in Painted Post while on highway survey for the proposed right-of-way of route 17. In the…

California Condors once soared across the continent, but progressive decline of food sources, habitat, and interactions with humans meant that by the 1980s, there were barely two dozen birds alive. Massive efforts to keep the largest of North American birds alive have resulted in three well-monitored flocks that once again soar over the western regions of Mexico and United States. Guest speaker Christina Baal is a bird artist and naturalist whose dream in life is to meet and paint 10,000…

Rick Bunting will be the first guest speaker to welcome us back to in-person meetings. He will share a compilation of photos taken over the past few years that focus on some of the our cavity nesting bird species and the family life they create in their special homes. Rick Bunting is Professor Emeritus from the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam where he served as Chair of Music Education and conductor of the renowned Crane Chorus. Previous to…

We’ll take a look at what’s going on with our trees - in the recent past and today - and what the future might hold. Environmental and ecological changes are accelerating, and trees are a sort of visible canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator of nature’s health. We’ll look at a few species from American Chestnut to Ashes to Eastern Hemlock. Are the problems manageable? Jeff Smith is a Naturalist and board member at Waterman Conservation Education Center (WCEC), with a focus on wetland…

Linda Spielman will be the guest speaker for our January meeting. She will discuss techniques for finding and identifying mammal tracks. Linda has been an environmental educator and student of animal tracking for over twenty-five years. She has studied tracking with Charles Worsham, Paul Rezendes, Susan Morse, George Leoniak, and Tom Brown. The tracker and artist Charles Worsham encouraged her to use drawing as a learning tool. Linda has been drawing ever since and loves the way drawing a track…

Tom Powell will be the guest speaker for our February meeting. He will discuss how anthropogenic climate change poses multifaceted threats to insect diversity well beyond the intuitive stresses of warmer summer temperatures. We will discuss some of the major ways that insects in our region are expected to be imperiled by changing seasonal regimes in the coming decades, including the regulation of life cycle timing, aspects of overwintering physiology, and altered interactions with other species.   As always, Naturalists'…

GOLDEN EAGLES OF THE CATSKILLS Peg DiBenedetto will be our guest speaker this month.  This ZOOM presentation highlights the work of the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society and the Eastern Golden Eagle Project to prove the existence of Golden Eagles in the Catskill Mountains. DiBenedetto volunteers with the NYS DEC, is the Board Chair of The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development and a Trustee of the Michael Kudish Natural History Preserve. She spent 20 years working in land management and holds…