This meeting and presentation took place both in person at the Liederkranz Club and concurrently online via Zoom.
At 7:00 pm, Board Member and Acting President Peter Davenport welcomed all to the first members meeting of 2026 and called the meeting to order.
Peter made the following announcements:
- The February regular members meeting will be held at the American Museum of Natural History, not the Liederkranz Club. Advanced registration is required to attend, and instructions for registration will be on the Society’s website. The meeting will concurrently be broadcast via Zoom, and registration for attending via Zoom will also be posted on the Society’s website.
- The Society’s 148th annual meeting will be held on March 10, 2026, at the Liederkranz Club at 6 East 87th Street. Dr. Trevor Price of the University of Chicago will be awarded the 2026 Eisenmann Medal and will present, “A Bird’s Life in the Anthropocene.”
- Peter noted that there will be a raffle and a silent auction held during the annual meeting. Donations for the silent auction have started to come in, and the Society is still welcoming more. He suggested ideas for donations such as tickets for the opera or a sports event, a few days at a vacation home, handicrafts, or books. Peter encouraged people to contact him to inquire about donations (he can be emailed at the president’s email address that can be found on the Society’s website: https://www.linnaeannewyork.org/contacts/).
- He welcomed five new members to the Linnaean Society as of December 2025:
- David Campbell
- Nicholas Kaledin
- Raymond Kraus
- Channing Wistar-Jones
- Patricia Wong
- He reported that the birdseed fund (for maintaining the Society’s birdfeeders in Central Park) has raised around $800, and the target is $2,000. He encouraged people to donate via the link that is in the president’s letter that was emailed to the membership on January 11, 2026.
- Peter expressed thanks to the newly formed nomination committee members, Dominic Ricci, Junko Suzuki, and Suzanne Zywicki. The committee is seeking members to fill the upcoming board vacancies, and he encouraged people to contact Dom, Junko, or Suzanne with suggestions.
- Peter thanked the Society’s board of directors for their work on restructuring some of the Society’s committees. He announced three new committees and thanked the new chairs: 1) the communications and content committee, chaired by Kristin Ellington, 2) the membership and events committee, co-chaired by Miriam Rakowski, and 3) the technology committee, chaired by Alan Drogin.
- Peter concluded his remarks about the Society’s business, encouraging members to register for the upcoming Birds and Brews trip to Bush Terminal Park in Brooklyn and to mark their calendars for May 2nd and 3rd for the birdathon fundraiser for Great Gull Island.
At 7:05 pm, Peter turned the meeting over to Vice President for Programs Karen Becker to introduce the night’s speaker, Anya Auerbach, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota.
Lecture: “Understanding Evolution through Madagascar’s Spectacular Radiation of Birds,” presented by Anya Auerbach
Madagascar is the world’s fourth largest island and a biodiversity hotspot, with the vast majority of its species being endemic, as Anya Auerbach explained in the opening of her talk. Giving geological historical context, she illustrated Madagascar’s location relative to other landmasses with four maps representing 135, 100, 88, and 60 million years ago. In the approximately 90 million years since Madagascar has become an isolated island, the vast majority of its species have arrived by dispersals over the ocean from Africa and India. She noted the groups of mammals that came by ocean (tenrecs, lemurs, Eupleridae, and Nesomyid rodents), and that bats came by flight. In terms of birds, Madagascar is the only island other than New Zealand that has endemic orders of birds—Madagascar has two: Mesites (Mesitornithiformes) and Cuckoo-roller (Leptosomiformes), and Madagascar has three endemic bird families: asities, tetrakas, and ground-rollers.
Ms. Auerbach’s research work is on evolutionary biology and her focus is on the evolution of birds in Madagascar. Her studies seek to answer questions about how and why Madagascar bird species diversity has occurred, why it occurs in some places and not others, and why biodiversity is so unevenly distributed. She explained the concept of adaptive radiation (“exceptional diversity in response to ecological opportunity”) using the example of Hawaiian honeycreepers—birds that filled ecological niches after their arrival to Hawaii—that evolved into as many as fifty different species from their Asian rosefinch ancestors. She pointed out, however, that even with ecological opportunities, adaptive radiation doesn’t necessarily occur, citing as an example the monarch flycatchers that reached Hawaii. The question is, why does it happen sometimes, and sometimes not?
Madagascar’s three largest adaptive radiations of birds have occurred with the vangas, the tetrakas (known as the Malagasy warblers), and the couas. Anya noted that it is unusual to have multiple radiations in the same place, and she is interested in how this diversity of radiations in Madagascar evolved. Her research has focused on the vangas. She evaluated the diversity in morphology (shape), methods of feeding, and environmental niches, and she compared the data of the Madagascar species to their non-Madagascar relatives. She acquired the data for this analysis by taking direct physical measurements of bird specimens from the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Ms. Auerbach shared graphical representations of results from her studies. They show that Malagasy vangas are much more diverse than non-Malagasy vangas. She also showed a phylogenetic (evolutionary) tree which was color-coded to indicate ecological diversification by feeding methods: gleaning, sallying, and probing. She explained that the earliest Madagascar vangas foraged by gleaning, as did the non-Malagasy vangas (which still do today), but that the Malagasy vangas continued to evolve with new ways of foraging. These new behaviors opened up new ecological opportunities and resultant speciation over tens of millions of years.
Ms. Auerbach also did genetic studies of the subspecies of the Crested Coua (Coua cristata), an arboreal bird in the cuckoo family that lives in distinct, major biomes across Madagascar, to see how these different populations are related to each other. She presented figures from these studies and said that she still has more work to do to determine if any of these subspecies are species in their own right.
This past September, Ms. Auerbach made her first field trip to Madagascar. She was part of a team that collected data on birds, including physical measurements, standardized color photographs, and blood samples. She shared stories of her experiences, talked about how data were collected, and showed photos of the birds that were caught in the mist nets and photos of other wildlife. Some of the birds were: Red-tailed Vanga, Dark Newtonia, Pollen’s Vanga, Crossley’s Vanga, Madagascar Blue Vanga, Hook-billed Vanga, Velvet Asity, Common Sunbird Asity, one Pitta-like Ground-Roller, a few tetrakas (Malagasy warblers), a single coua, and one (very hard to catch) Cuckoo-roller. Ms. Auerbach said that the Cuckoo-roller was incredibly exciting—they rarely fly into nets and get caught, and there had been only one tissue sample of a Cuckoo-roller in collections, and now there are two.
Ms. Auerbach concluded her talk by thanking the many people in the US and Madagascar who provided both scientific and logistical support for her work.
Following is Anya Auerbach’s abstract of her talk:
Madagascar is one of the most significant global biodiversity hotspots, with a fantastically unique array of organisms found nowhere else on earth. Many of these organisms form adaptive radiations – groups of closely related species that, like the more famous Darwin’s finches and Hawaiian honeycreepers, have evolved exceptional ecological diversity. Anya Auerbach’s research seeks to better understand this diversification process, focusing on the three major radiations of birds in Madagascar: the vangas, tetrakas, and couas. Anya combines a variety of approaches, including phylogenetics, biogeography, and morphometrics, and ultimately aims to use this system of multiple independent, co-occurring radiations to explore general patterns and processes of diversification and their repeatability.
At 7:55 pm, the Q&A session began with questions from both the in-person audience and from those on Zoom.
At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President for Administration Amanda Bielskas thanked Anya Auerbach for her talk.
At 8:17 pm the meeting was adjourned.
Anya Auerbach’s presentation and the Q&A session have been recorded in their entirety, along with Board Member and Acting President Peter Davenport’s opening meeting remarks. The recording is available for viewing on the Linnaean Society of New York website under the dropdown menu: Programs/Watch/ and on the Society’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@linnaeanny/videos
Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary