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Hillside Club Fireside Talk on Monday, February 5, 2018 “Golden Gate Raptors, Rachel Carson, and the

Hillside Club Fireside Talk on Monday, February 5, 2018

Members, Friends & Neighbors are Invited

Free and open to the public!

Talk begins at 7:30 pm

In September 1933, along an Appalachian ridgeline in Pennsylvania, two bird-watchers spent a day photographing the annual autumn hawk-shoot. Hawk-shooting was common then, in California as in Pennsylvania. Hawks were vermin, and needed to be controlled. However few places on the continent offered shooters as dense a raptor migration as on Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania. Hawks were slaughtered by the hundreds each day.

The photos were shown around at the next meeting of the New York Audubon Society, and one woman in particular was incensed by this pointless raptor genocide. Rosalie Edge flew into action, soon establishing Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the first non-game wildlife refuge in the world. Hawk Mountain staff began daily hawk counts in 1934 to keep track the numbers of hawks being saved by the new sanctuary. They had no idea that DDT was about to enter the picture.

Please come join us at the Hillside Club for the rest of the story: how Rachel Carson found the Hawk Mountain data set, how migration counts like Golden Gate became established across the planet, and how citizen/community science became critical personnel for many of these wildlife counts.

Bay Area native Allen Fish grew up in the South Bay, attending UC Davis in the early 1980s, and returning there to teach Raptor Biology twenty years later. Since 1985 he has been the director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a cooperative long-term wildlife monitoring of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service.

WEBSITES:

www.ggro.org

www.parksconservancy.org

BLOGS:

http://innernatureouternature.blogspot.com/

http://raptorbio.blogspot.com/

APRIL FIRESIDE: SAVE THE DATE

Jesse Arreguin, Mayor of Berkeley

Monday, April 2, 2018

Topic information to be announced.

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