VA Birders,
The Virginia Avian Records Committee wants to welcome its incoming
members, Dan Cristol and Bob Ake, and its incoming Chair, Ned Brinkley,
and to thank its outgoing members, George Armistead and Don Schwab and
outgoing Chair, Bob Cross, for their devotion and service to VARCOM.
Most subscribers to VA-BIRD will know Dan and Bob from field birding or
from their roles in Virginia ornithology. For those who haven't had the
pleasure yet, a brief introduction for each is below.
Bob Ake, originally from Indiana, came to Virginia in 1970 from
California, to teach in the Chemistry Department at Old Dominion
University in Norfolk; he served both as Chair of that Department and as
President of the Faculty Senate during his time at ODU. He is currently
an Emeritus Professor at ODU and conducts ornithological research (using
biochemical methods) on Neotropical migrants on the Eastern Shore in
conjunction with the Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory and the
Center for Conservation Biology. Bob started VARCOM a generation ago
and was instrumental in the modernizing of both the Virginia Society of
Ornithology and the Cape Henry Audubon Society, for which he has served
as President. He has been one of the state's most active field birders,
especially in southern and eastern Virginia, since his arrival in the
Commonwealth, and has guided many of the state's birders on public field
trips locally and to Arizona, Manitoba, Texas, California, Ecuador,
Costa Rica, Venezuela, and many other places on the planet.
Dan Cristol was raised in Philadelphia, where he started birding at the
age of 3. He has been doing Christmas Bird Counts in Virginia since he
was a young teenager. He is married to Rebecca Reimers and has two
young daughters, Indigo and Lazuli. After graduating from Cornell
University in 1985 and working as an intern for the Nature Conservancy,
Dan entered a PhD. program at Indiana University-Bloomington, and spent
6 years studying how pecking orders affect migration distance in
dark-eyed juncos. He then did three years of post-doctoral research
fellowships - at Oxford studying the brains of birds that have to
remember where they've stored their food, and at University of
California-Davis studying the behavior of crows that drop walnuts from
great heights to crack them open. He began teaching Animal Behavior and
Ornithology at the College of William & Mary in 1996, and is now an
Associate Professor studying the brains of migratory and non-migratory
juncos, clam-dropping by herring gulls, and the success of birds living
on artificially-created habitats such as golf courses and mitigation
wetlands. His favorite bird is the Baltimore oriole.
Our new Chair, Ned Brinkley, is Editor-in-Chief of _North American
Birds_, the successor journal to _American Birds_, which digests all
birders' records quarterly and publishes photographs of unusual species
and plumages in North America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the
Hawaiian Islands. Ned has been birding for 32 years in the state and is
particularly interested in difficult identification questions (gulls and
shorebirds are favorites), as well as in the changing distribution of
birds in North America generally. He runs a bed-and-breakfast designed
around natural history themes in Cape Charles, Virginia, guides birding
tours internationally, and writes books and articles on birds and
birding in spare time.
Planned changes for 2004 include:
* Updating the Review List (the list of species for which the committee
would like to review details)
* Updating the By-laws
* Modernizing the website, making the Review List clear here and making
it easier to submit records by email; displaying photographs here of
Virginia rarities, and providing sample exemplary write-ups
* Reviewing historical records
* Reviewing archival records that might now be included in a new
Category (such as Category 3)
* Scanning the entire VARCOM archive to CD, to protect it and to make it
accessible to researchers
* Making the database internally consistent and easy to search
* Reviewing old records submitted but not yet reviewed or not reviewed
but not in light of modern taxonomic arrangements or identification
information
Many other changes are planned, but the message from the new team at
VARCOM is simple: we would love to include your records of unusual
species, subspecies, or plumages in the growing permanent archive of
Virginia's birdlife, and we'll be glad to help you learn how best to
document the birds that you see, for inclusion in the archive. The
reason some records are not accepted into the archive is often not that
the observer's identification was felt to be incorrect but that the
written description (or photographs) did not rule out other
possibilities conclusively. So while the committee can't accept
everything it receives, the Secretary and Chair do plan to work closely
with those who would like to submit interesting records for review, in
the interest of bringing the thoroughness of submissions in line with
the needs of the permanent record and archive.
Stay tuned to this listserv for other announcements about the new
VARCOM, and don't hesitate to contact me with questions.
Susan Heath
Secretary, Virginia Avian Records Committee
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