On Tuesday, November 13th, the Linnaean Society of New York's 2018-2019 Speaker Program will feature two new presentations. Neither has to do with birds directly, but we believe many birders will find the programs of interest.
6:00 pm - Understanding New World Butterflies via New Taxonomy - Rick Cech The Butterfly Family. It has taken some decades for the promise of DNA-based analysis to reach maturity. Recently, the family relationships of butterflies have been much clarified, an effort drawing on the work of multiple international contributors. But this work has not been just intellectual-for the speaker it has opened a path to better understanding some long confusing tangles of butterfly groups, especially in the Neotropics. Join Rick as he walks through the recent findings, illustrated with photos of some of the planet's most exquisite organisms. An active field naturalist, author, and photographer, Rick Cech is an affiliate curator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Entomology. He is the principal author and photographer of Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer's Guide (Princeton, 2005), and wrote A Distributional Checklist of the Butterflies and Skippers of the New York City Area. 7:30 pm - Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel - Carl Safina Consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, nonverbal communication, imitation, teaching, grief.. Carl Safina shows, scientifically, that in some surprising ways many nonhuman minds are rather similar to ours. They know who their friends are. They know who their enemies are. They seek status. Their lives may follow the arc of a career. Relationships define them, as relationships define us. Carl Safina spent time working with researchers who've devoted decades to studying particular families of wild elephants, wolves, and killer whales. He got to know these free-living creatures as individuals, along with their children and grandchildren. Safina explores up-to-date brain studies showing new discoveries about the similarities in our consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, nonverbal communication, and the capacity for grief among nonhuman beings. Safina is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. ----------------------- Both presentations are free and will be held in the Linder Theater on the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (enter at West 77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue). All welcome! Complete details of these exciting presentations and the rest of the 2018-2019 program can be found here: https://linnaeannewyork.org/programs-trips/lsny-programs.html Richard Fried The Linnaean Society of New York -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
