The Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary established the memorial bird garden area for long-time BBC member, former president and nonstop trip leader Ida Giriunas this past spring and continued to add to it this summer and fall.  They fenced it in to keep deer from eating everything, and plan to add more feeders in the colder temperatures, along with some benches.  They are expanding the bird garden area between the classroom and their office which attaches to the back of the Carol Decker classroom.  An additional area was recently cleared and mulched on the side of the house by Bradstreet Trail, and will be planted in the spring with all native plants.  This area will also have a water feature and some bird feeders.  The garden will fill in over time with paths going through it. Once the project is completed, IRWS will  add a plaque honoring Ida.  It looks amazing, even if a bit dry now from the summer heat and no rain.  We think Ida would love it! IRWS states that the birds and butterflies already do.  Please stop by to see the progress. A formal dedication will take place sometime in the future when public health concerns permit.

The BBC is pleased to announce its donation of $250 to support the Purple Martin Legacy Project at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. The Friends of the Parker River NWR initiated this worthy project to expand the Purple Martin colonies on the refuge. Decades ago, there were up to a dozen martin colonies down the length of the island. Over the years the colonies dwindled as the wooden bird houses succumbed to time and weather. Through the efforts of BBC member Sue McGrath, who replaced the old, decaying structures with a new system of gourd houses, there are now two martin colonies thriving on the refuge, and another colony located at the north end of the island at the site of the former refuge headquarters. This new project, spearheaded by BBC member Doug Chickering, will start by adding one colony, at a site to be determined, with a goal of restoring the legacy of past years when Purple Martins were a presence the length of the refuge. The Friends plan to recruit volunteers, via their website, to aid in maintaining and documenting the progress of any new colony.

If you wish to support this project individually, you can send a check to Friends of the Parker River NWR, with Purple Martin in the memo line. Mail the check to:

Friends of the Parker River NWR
6 Plum Island Turnpike
Newburyport, Massachusetts 01950.

The Friends, and the Purple Martins, will appreciate any donation, large or small.

The BBC is proud to announce that we have renamed our Young Birder’s Scholarship as the Bill Drummond Young Birder’s Scholarship, in honor of one of our club’s most important and most inspiring leaders. Bill was a lifelong birder who learned to identify birds while growing up in Youngstown, Ohio. After his graduation from John Carroll University in 1965, he won a scholarship to attend Boston College, where he received his M.A., and started his career teaching mathematics at Malden Catholic High School. He served the BBC for four decades, as trip leader, board member from 1975 to 2003, bulletin editor and field trip coordinator from 1975 to 1985, and as club president from 1987 to 1989. Best known for leading an astonishing number of club trips, he was admired by countless club members for his enthusiasm, teaching skills, and helpfulness in nurturing beginning birders of all ages. Many BBC members will never forget Bill urging them to maintain their “birding intensity” and to “get on this bird if it’s the last thing you ever do!” In addition to field trips around Massachusetts, he led BBC members on private trips around the country and around the world. At a 2014 members’ meeting, five years before his death, the BBC recognized and celebrated Bill’s tremendous contributions to our club.

The naming of our annual scholarship program is a fitting tribute to Bill. As a BBC leader and as a much beloved math teacher at Andover High School for forty years, he dedicated much of his life to teaching and guiding young people through life. Birding brought him a wide circle of friends as well as his wife Barbara, a dedicated teacher herself, who met Bill on a BBC trip and married him in 1980. Barbara came to realize over the years that “Bill loved birds, but more than that, he loved showing birds to people. It was the human connection that motivated him.”

The BBC scholarship program, initiated in 2015, has been a great success, awarding scholarships to eleven young birders to attend National Audubon’s Hog Island camp in Maine. The 2020 summer camp sessions were cancelled, but the BBC has reserved slots for our two recipients in the 2021 summer camp and hope to award two new scholarships in 2021. These scholarships are supported through member donations. Members can go to the BBC website and make a donation of any amount, in Bill’s honor, to the Bill Drummond Young Birder’s Scholarship.

The Brookline Bird Club has almost 80 years of field trip reports that we’d like to add to eBird. As one of the oldest bird clubs in the United States, our archive of field trip data is a potentially rich source of information for researchers studying long term population trends, as well as helping inform current conservation efforts within the state.

Currently, the oldest report in eBird for Mt Auburn is from 19th May, 1957. This was a solid twelve warbler day. Missing from that list – Northern Cardinal (first eBird report for Mt Auburn 1967), Northern Mockingbird (1964), Tufted Titmouse (1970), Red-bellied Woodpecker (1991). The BBC trip reports contain a huge amount of data on the rise and fall of these and other species from many of the key birding locations in the state, including Mt Auburn reports from as far back as 1939.

Reports from the last 25 years of birds from the State Species of Concern List will be evaluated for possible submission to the MA department of wildlife. A list of those species can be found here: www.mass.gov/service-details/list-of-vertebrates

The club has scanned decades worth of field trip cards, but needs help converting those images to a format than can be uploaded to eBird. We’re looking for volunteers to help transcribe data from the field card images onto spreadsheets. The only requirements are a willingness to commit a useful amount of time to the project, and a keen attention to detail. We estimate that it could take up to about 20 hours to transcribe the data for recent years (“America’s most active bird club!”); less for the earlier years. If you can only commit to working on a single year’s worth of data over the course of many months, that’s fine. This will be a marathon, not a sprint.

If you’re interested in helping, please contact David Scott for further details: davidscott6@yahoo.co.uk

Completed club field trip card from May 20, 1939.

The date of July 17, 1918 was marked in the calendar of Bostonians as the fifth anniversary of the Brookline Bird Club. There was a birthday party at “Lake Walden” to celebrate the event, and attendees were encouraged to “Take Luncheon”!

Sadly, the BBC’s birthday party ended up not being the major news from that year. As we now take action to protect ourselves from Covid–19, there are many reminders in our current news of the pandemic that started in 1918. But it was also an interesting time for our fledgling bird club. The BBC has a rich archive of club records, much of which was recently scanned into electronic format. If you’re stuck inside, want to see what life was like for the club over 100 years ago, take a look at the club bulletins (blue book) from 1918. (Click on the image to the right.)

Highlights include a lecture given on March 25, 1918 by the State Ornithologist, Edward Howe Forbush, which was illustrated with “colored lantern slides”. Like most club meetings, this was held in the public library in Brookline. And who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall of the meeting later that year, on December 3, when Dr. Eugene W. Afford gave “whistling imitations of Notes and Songs of our Common Birds”.

Perhaps surprisingly, there were no trips to Mt Auburn Cemetery in 1918, a staple of our modern spring schedule. According to club historian John Nelson, Mt Auburn doesn’t appear in his archival notes until after the war, when a Chuck-will’s-widow was recorded on a club trip there in 1952.

On a larger scale, 1918 was important for conservation as the year of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Signed by the United States (under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson) and Great Britain (on behalf of Canada), the law prohibited (with some exceptions granted by federal permit) the hunting and killing of birds. We are indebted to that act for the rich avifauna that we can still enjoy today.

Stay healthy during this time. And, if you’re interested, do to take a minute to read through the archive from 1918 to see where the club was leading walks, and how much a return on the trolley would have cost you to get there.

Click on the image above to view the 1918 club bulletin.

In 1955, naturalists Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher published their bestselling book Wild America, chronicling a now-legendary 30,000-mile trip across North America. Fifty years later, author Scott Weidensaul has retraced their epic journey, to see what we’ve gained and lost, and to catch a glimpse of what the future holds for wildlife and wild lands. From the great seabird cliffs of Newfoundland to the cypress swamps of Florida, from the cloud forests of the Sierra Madre in Mexico to lonely islands far out in the Bering Sea, Weidensaul searches out the wild heart of the continent — and finds it strong.

Members and guests are cordially invited. Admission is free.

Saturday, February 29, 2020 at 7:00 pm
Social Hour and Light Refreshments at 6:00 pm

John Glenn Middle School
99 McMahon Road
Bedford, MA