Hog Island: A Young Perspective
In this program, you can follow Pedro Miranda, a young birder in his trip to Audubon’s Mountain to Sea birding camp, as well as a highlight of the events that got him there. Audubon’s Mountain to Sea birding camp is a 6-day and 5-night camp that covers both the boreal forest of Maine at Borestone Mountain Audubon Sanctuary to Coastal Maine at Hog Island. The days there are packed with workshops, lessons on conservation projects and of course birding tours!
Pedro Miranda is a junior at North Penn High School and one of Audubon’s most recent recipients of the Griscom Scholarship. He has been birding for around two years and within that time period has amassed a life list of 250 species and around 400 checklists in eBird across the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Pedro has also volunteered for a breeding bird survey done by the Friends of Sparta Mountain in Sparta New Jersey and is the current president of North Penn’s Environmental Club.
“Myiarchus and La Paz”
A Presentation by Glenn Seeholzer: Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow, American Museum of Natural History
Glenn Seeholzer studies avian speciation through the integration of genomic, phenotypic, and environmental datasets. Growing up in Abington, PA, he would often join Wyncote Audubon field trips as a fledgling birder. After undergraduate at Cornell University, his interest in Neotropical avian diversity brought him to the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science where he completed his doctoral studies on patterns of diversification in the ovenbirds (Furnariidae). In support of his research, he has led or participated in nine major collecting expeditions to Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia over the past decade in addition to numerous birding forays into remote corners of the Neotropics. He is currently a Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History where he continues his research on avian speciation in the Neotropics.
For the past century, Neotropical ornithologists have worked against a backdrop of dramatic social and political changes in Latin America. Nowhere is this truer than in Colombia, the most biodiverse country in the world and host to the longest armed conflict in the Western hemisphere’s modern history. Glenn’s talk, “Myiarchus and La Paz”, will cover his research on speciation in the Dusky-capped Flycatcher (Myiarchus tuberculifer) and how it intersects with Colombia’s history of conflict and more recently, peace.