Recent Tech Advancements And Bird In Flight Photography – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
2021-12-01 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online
Burrowing owl flight with dove Photo: Rob Bielefeld
This presentation will focus on recent advancements in camera and lens technology. From sensors, to IBIS, to AF, advancements have made at getting great birds-in-flight images easier than ever before. However, with advancements come potential pitfalls. Speaker Rob Bielefeld will discuss both sides of the technological coin: how tech has made bird photography easier, but also how all these advancements may lead some bird/wildlife photographers astray.

Queer Birds: Community Inclusion, Community Building, and Community Science
2021-06-02 19:00 - 20:00
In the early 2000s, LBGT rights were under attack; there was no marriage equality, and LGBTQ people often felt unsafe in the field. To build a veritable, ongoing community, a group of LGBTQ birders banded together to start what is now called QBNA—Queer Birders of North America. Local Bay Area birder Jennifer Rycenga spearheaded the west coast organizing efforts for this group, which has now flourished for almost two decades, with biennial birding trips both nationally and abroad. The community built up through QBNA has always been open to all allies of the cause, and has been the occasion for genuine solidarity with many straight birders. This model of open, accepting community parallels the 21st century growth in Community Science projects like eBird, iNaturalist, and the BioBlitz movement. This talk will look at the history of LGBTQ birders and QBNA in particular, and the rapid growth of community science in the Bay Area, as examples of how birding can create and sustain diverse communities of people.
Jennifer serves as the Board President of Sequoia Audubon. Jennifer teaches at San Jose State University in Humanities.

Do Acorn Woodpeckers make granaries or do granaries make Acorn Woodpeckers?
2021-01-20 19:00 - 20:30
Speaker: Sahas Barve
We will plunge into the complicated social lives of acorn woodpeckers. How they build granaries and what they will do to win access to a big granary. Using cutting-edge radio tracking technology and over 45 years of demographic data, we will learn how these common backyard birds cooperate with close relatives to raise offspring and eavesdrop on neighbors to gain social information. Finally we will look briefly at how fire may be affecting the socio-biology of this enigmatic bird of the Californian oak savannah.
Bio: Sahas Barve is from Mumbai, India and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He is an avian ecologist, interested in understanding why some birds are social and what is the evolutionary benefit of social behavior to these birds. He is an avid birder and wants to see 6,000 species by the time he is 60.
