At the Annual Dinner, Sophie Webb will receive the Eisenmann Medal, the Linnaean Society’s highest award, given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur. She is a lecturer, illustrator, author, artist, field biologist and ecologist of world-wide range as well as an ornithologist, and her work runs the gamut from cruise ships to research vessels and from children’s books to scientific papers. A co-founder and board member of Oikonos, which has conservation projects in many countries, she is perhaps best known as the co-author (with Steve N.G. Howell) and illustrator of A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America, the standard field guide since its publication by Oxford University Press in 1995. She writes of her talk, “About twelve years ago I started to spend up to seven months a year working on a variety of research cruises, censusing seabirds. These ranged from cruises of a few weeks to longer cruises that lasted up to five months. My talk will be about the latter. The long cruises were run by the Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC), a lab of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration based in La Jolla, California. The main purpose of the expeditions was to census marine mammals in the Central and Eastern Tropical Pacific, but, given the unique nature (and expense) of where the cruises were going, the researchers at SWFSC created an interdisciplinary program that included oceanography, turtle, fish and squid sampling and seabird censusing, the last being my contribution to the overall picture of the ecology of the region. My talk will focus on the wildlife (mainly birds and marine mammals) we encountered. Many species of seabirds, some little known, migrate to or through the region from remote Pacific islands. The data gathered on the cruises have increased our understanding of seabird ranges away from their breeding colonies and marine mammal distribution and recovery (or lack of recovery) in the Pacific. Mostly I will talk about the birds and the mammals but will briefly touch on some conservation issues in the region.”
