Date/Time
Wednesday, Sep 01, 2021
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
This meeting will be on Zoom, NOT in person.
“Fall” is a great season for birding at Blandy Experimental Farm, part of University of Virginia and home to the State Arboretum of Virginia.
Birds disperse after breeding and begin appearing in August, before the main push of neotropical migrants in September and early October. As the warblers wane, sparrows from the upper Midwest and the boreal forest begin moving through in late October and early November along with Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, kinglets, and Rusty Blackbirds. In irruption years, the conifer collection attracts Purple Finches and Pine Siskins and even the occasional crossbill. Fall also has always been the best season for rarities at Blandy.
Blandy Experimental Farm supports student and faculty research in the environmental sciences, but as home to the State Arboretum, the public is warmly welcomed. The mix of field, forest, wetland, and agricultural habitats within its 712 acres makes it one of the best all-around birding spots in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Blandy is open to everyone from dawn until dusk, 365 days a year, and there is no admission or parking charges. It is approximately 2 hrs north of Charlottesville in Clark County.
Background
Dr. Carr completed BA in biology in 1981 at Thomas More College in Kentucky. His graduate studies started my in the Zoology department at Miami University in Oxford, OH studying the interactions among stream salamanders in the genus Desmognathus. In 1983 he moved to the Zoology department at University of Maryland to continue work on salamanders (this time, woodland salamanders in the genus Plethodon) earning a PhD in Zoology in 1990.. Midway through my degree, his growing interest in quantitative genetics changed to work on plants. Subsequently, his focus has been on the genetics and reproductive ecology of plants.
After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Botany department at University of Maryland, he briefly was at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA before arriving a year later at the University of Virginia in 1997. Currently he is a Research Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, and is the Director of the Blandy Experimental Farm in Clarke County.. My current research focuses on pollen foraging by bumble bees and the olfactory signals that plants use to communicate with their pollinators.
David grew up in northern Kentucky along the Ohio River, just south of Cincinnati where he discovered birding as a teenager in Kentucky. His best friend and next door neighbor, Geoff Hill, caught birding fever a couple of years earlier and passed it on to me (Geoff, still a close friend, is now an ornithologist at Auburn University). He has been an avid birder ever since, exploring every state in the continental US.
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