Linnaean Society of New York Regular Meeting Minutes—October 8, 2024
This meeting and presentation took place entirely online via Zoom.
At 7:00 pm, President Debbie Mullins welcomed the attendees and called the Society meeting to order.
President Mullins made the following announcements:
Membership dues fund the Society’s programs and activities and are the Society’s largest source of income. President Mullins thanked those who have already paid and explained to those who haven’t how they can pay online, or by mailing a check.
New York City Council legislation, Intro 896, (Lights Out bill) is pending. The proposed bill would require privately owned commercial and industrial buildings to turn off nonessential nighttime illumination during peak bird migration. President Mullins encouraged the members of the audience to write or call their city council member to urge sponsorship of this bill. Artificial light is responsible for attracting and disorienting migrating birds, resulting in high mortality from window collisions.
Society members had been asked to vote online on two motions in advance of this meeting:
Motion 1: Request to approve the minutes of the September, 2024, regular meeting. The minutes were approved by a vote of 128 in favor, four abstaining, and none opposed.
Motion 2: Request to approve the membership applications of ten new members. The new memberships were approved with 131 in favor, one abstaining, and none opposed. President Mullins warmly welcomed the following new members:
- David Berger
- Alison Dundy
- Ann Goodwin
- Stevan Hubbard
- Peggy Maslow
- Joseph Navarro
- Lindsay Drogin
- Nancy Rosenberg
- Susan Klingelhoefer
- Joan Cade
President Mullins again welcomed all the new members to the Linnaean Society, said that she was happy they had joined, and looked forward to meeting them soon. She also invited the non-member attendees to join the Society, explaining that the Society is open to everyone who has an interest in birds or other areas of natural science and that the membership application is on the Society’s website.
At 7:03 pm, President Mullins turned to the lecture program and introduced the speaker, Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist in the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and director of BirdCast—a massive collaborative research and development project working to model the dynamics of bird migration.
Lecture: “Bird Migration in the Era of Big Data: BirdCast Perspectives on the Future of Monitoring Migrating Birds,” presented by Dr. Andrew Farnsworth
This evening’s lecture, like that of last month’s, once again addressed the tragic population loss of nearly three billion birds in North America over the past fifty years. This time the focus was on the development of quantitative tools—BirdCast, its predecessors, and other methods under development—and their power to better understand bird migration and promote solutions to reverse population declines, particularly in migrating bird species.
Dr. Farnsworth began by giving a historical perspective demonstrating how far we have come in the evaluation of bird migration data. Thanks to technological developments, especially those evolving in the digital age, the amount of bird data has exploded along with analytical abilities to identify patterns, trends, and relationships from enormous quantities of data. He described the first coordinated scientific effort to quantify nocturnal bird migration across the continental United States. During four October nights in the early 1950s, hundreds of observers trained telescopes on the moon and counted the silhouettes of birds. It took almost fifteen years to analyze and publish the results. In addition, early in the development of radar technology it was recognized that birds were being detected on radar scans. Weather radar scans from this period were recorded on 16 mm and 35 mm film. Correlating the moon-watching data with weather surveillance radar data became one of the foundational approaches to the development of the BirdCast bird migration quantification model. Today, computer power, big data analysis techniques, and machine learning are being harnessed to interpret and manage the enormous quantities of data and to present information in close to real-time on the BirdCast platform.
Moving on to BirdCast itself, Dr. Farnsworth presented a map of the United States showing all the weather surveillance radar locations, with weather superimposed and blue blotches (which are the birds) around many of the radar locations. Next he showed an example of a BirdCast live bird migration map recorded on October 6, 2023, at 22:20 ET, and described many of its features. He noted that this particular night marked the largest migration night ever recorded on BirdCast; he hopes that conservation work will cause this number to increase. The migration map he showed was on a continental scale, but BirdCast also provides information at state and county levels; to illustrate, he showed New York County examples from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The 2024 panel was particularly notable. It was from three nights before, on October 5th, when the largest number of birds yet recorded in the BirdCast/dashboard era occurred in Manhattan, with over one million crossing over the county—an estimated 1,028,300 birds.
From the perspective of bird conservation, one of the powerful outcomes of the BirdCast project has been the ability to reliably forecast bird migration—both the numbers and the locations of where the birds are going to be. This has big implications for reducing bird collisions with buildings and windows—a major cause of the decline in populations of migrating birds. Dr. Farnsworth talked about how lights attract and disorient birds, pointing out that untreated glass can be deadly, but when lights are turned off, typical migration behavior resumes.
BirdCast migration forecasting, in tandem with initiatives for turning out lights on high migration nights, can substantially reduce the number of bird collisions and fatalities, as can bird-safe window designs and retrofits. Dr. Farnsworth cited the example of McCormick Place, an enormous, glass-faced convention center in Chicago along the shoreline of Lake Michigan that is directly on the Mississippi Flyway. For decades, it has been the site of large numbers of bird collisions and resulting deaths, especially during bird migration. A particularly high number of bird fatalities on the night of October 4-5, 2023, received a lot of press. McCormick Place installed bird-safe window film in September, 2024, and now participates in the Lights Out Chicago program, closing drapes at night, and reducing lighting during peak migration periods. Dr. Farnsworth has heard that since these changes were made, the number of collisions has dropped dramatically for the first time in forty years. He cited other examples of successful Lights Outs programs and bird-safe design, and hopes that they will bring an awareness and motivation for bird conservation around the world.
Dr. Farnsworth’s final topic was evolving technologies for using big data in the study of bird migration. He talked about the identification of birds by sound, and collecting and analyzing flight calls of nocturnal migrating birds. He also discussed the potential to use today’s technology to analyze the pre-digital migration radar data from the 1950s and 60s in order to gain more understanding of historical migration: the intensity of migration, where it was occurring, its relationship to weather, and how it has changed. He talked about remote sensing, and how it might be used to understand bird biology and behavior interacting in the atmosphere—for example, when unusual events occur, like hurricane Milton. He also mentioned thermal photography as a way to identify bird migration at night.
And why go to all this effort, gathering all this data, pooling community input, analyzing it all? The bottom line is that understanding the science allows us to make changes that will reverse this “horrible curve” and thereby increase bird populations.
At 8:00 pm, Vice President Doug Futuyma thanked Dr. Farnsworth for a fantastic talk, saying that it had been amazing. He then hosted the Q&A session.
At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President Futuyma thanked Dr. Farnsworth again for a really, really interesting talk, and at 8:32 pm the meeting was adjourned.
A recording of this meeting in its entirety can be found on the Linnaean Society of New York website.
Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary
