Bird Migration Film Epic Journeys Will Start 2014-2015 Programs

Shawn Carey

Each year millions of shorebirds make an amazing round-trip journey between the Northern and Southern hemisphere. Join us on September 10 when filmmaker Shawn Carey presents his documentary Epic Journeys which looks at three shorebird species — Red Knot, Piping Plover and Semipalmated Sandpiper—and the challenges these species face during each of their monumental annual treks.

Shawn Carey is a resident of Boston, MA and has been photographing birds and other wildlife for about 20 years. He’s been teaching wildlife photography for Mass Audubon for over 12 years.

Brian Kleinman

Taped entirely in Connecticut, Connecticut Reptiles takes viewers on a video adventure that shows the remarkable variety of the state’s native snakes, turtles, and lizard, and the natural places they inhabit. On October 8, naturalist Brian Kleinman will present his film with incredible insights into each animal’s unique adaptations, lifestyles and place in local landscapes. He will also bring some live reptiles.

On November 12 naturalists and photographers Barbara and Peter Rzasa will present Iceland’s Birds, Flowers and Wildlife, a slide show of several Icelandic flora and fauna that can be found while traveling Iceland’s 832-mile long Ring Road.

Peter Rzasa

Iceland is often called “The Land of Fire and Ice” because of the many volcanoes, glaciers and spectacular waterfalls that populate the country. The country is also a noted birder’s paradise famous for its population of Atlantic puffins, ptarmigan, arctic terns and other arctic birds found along Iceland’s 3,700 miles of coast. Reindeer, arctic fox, humpback whales and seals can frequently be seen while Icelandic horses can be found roaming the farmlands. 

Climate Change is a simple phrase used to describe an incredibly complex issue. Extensive research has identified changes in weather patterns and seasonal temperatures that are affecting ecosystems and communities from our backyards to the entire planet. The effect of climate change on birds could be significant. Saltmarsh sparrows nest just

Patrick Comins

above the high tide line and are already susceptible to spring tides flooding their nests. What would climate change-caused sea level rise mean to the survival of this species? On December 10, Heather Crawford will give us a look at the history of the Earth and human civilization, along with some simple science, so that we can better understand how we have come to our current situation and what kinds of decisions will need to be made as we move forward as stewards of our world.

Heather is an environmental educator who spent 14 years working with the Connecticut Sea Grant Extension Program and presenting programs on coastal ecosystems and land use impacts on water sources. She now chairs the Madison Conservation Commission and does freelance environmental education, including leading ecology field trips for local schools.

(Reprinted from September 2014 Newsletter.)

Citizen Science: MonitorChange

On the ground impacts of Global Climate change, sea level rise, changes to our forests and landscapes, development, all can be measured with precise scientific instruments. But the money and time to do so is often just not there and thus major changes around us are happening but remain undocumented. However, a partial solution is at hand by simply taking pictures over time from the same location. Combine those pictures into a sequence and you directly and permanently document and demonstrate change,and these changes can then be quantified.

MonitorChange (monitorchange.org) a concept to crowdsource changes in the environments where we live, work, play, or care about, be they parks, our backyards, our rivers, or our city scape, using nothing more than camera phones. The new thing here is that multiple people with multiple cameras can take pictures which are then processed using existing software so that no matter what camera type or format the pictures were originally taken with they are transformed into uniform snapshots of the same scene with the same dimensions with all the objects in the pictures the same size and shape. This allows all the different pictures to be put into time lapse sequences that can be made into a video, a slide show, or used to measure change direct over days, years, or decades.

The concept uses little more than a camera phone and a stout piece of bent steel to start.

A piece of angled steel is firmly mounted to provide a consistent height, angle and direction from which to shoot images using nearly any camera. When collected together, photo-stitching software aligns and pieces together images to show changes over time.

This concept has lots of applications to the type of work that ecologists, foresters, land managers, and environmental citizen groups do and provides an easy (and actually information dense) way of tracking long-term changes using volunteers using the smart phone that many carry in their pocket.

People can do this right now using existing materials at single sites or they can organize networks of camera stations at scales of parks, cities, watersheds, counties, states, countries, or the world.

Right now, MonitorChange is a presentation of an idea. Anyone can modify this in any way they like and implement it at any scale. No copyrights. No permissions needed. 

A short video explaining the MonitorChange can be found at http://youtube/A1ULAsEQAWs.

For more technical details on doing the picture rectification see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2pEKjw3Idk

Possible places/groups to implement are watershed societies, riverkeepers, stream crossings, trail clubs, stream monitoring groups; coastal beaches, dunes, marshes; lichen plots, restorations sites, forestry sites, parks, refuges, new developments, your backyard, construction of a building, the green-up in spring and the leaf drop in the fall of forests and so forth

For more information and to sign up go to monitorchange.org.

MonitorChange was developed by Sam Droege, a biologist at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.

Source: monitorchange.org/group

(From the September 2013 newsletter)

Climate Change? Yes.

From environment360:

New NASA satellite images show that the surface of virtually the entire ice sheet covering Greenland experienced melting in mid-July, a phenomenon not seen in three decades of satellite observations. Temperatures rose so high that ice on the Greenland’s highest peak, Summit Station, turned to slush, NASA said. Until the severe melting earlier this month, the greatest extent of surface melting observed by satellites over the past three decades covered about 55 percent of the ice sheet; on July 12, 97 percent of the ice sheet experienced surface melting.

These NASA maps show how, within the space of four days earlier this month, Greenland's vast ice sheet faced degree of melting not seen in three decades of satellite observations as temperatures there rose. The image at left shows the ice sheet on July 8, with a large part of it experiencing no melting in summer, as is typical. By July 12, the surface of virtually the entire ice sheet was melting, a phenomenon not seen in three decades of satellite imaging. (NASA)