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Joint TOS/VSO 2012 Annual Meeting
Johnson City, Tennessee, May 18–20, 2012
Hosted by The Bristol Bird Club.
The Bristol Bird Club, a chapter of TOS and VSO, will be hosting the 2012 Joint Annual Meetings for the Tennessee Ornithological Society and the Virginia Society of Ornithology on May 18–20 in Johnson City, Tennessee which is just a few miles south of the Tennessee–Virginia stateline.
More details here »
Piney Grove Field Trip
June 2, 2012
Again this summer the VSO and Center for Conservation Biology (CCB) are offering a field trip to The Nature Conservancy’s Piney Grove Preserve, site of nesting Red-Cockaded Woodpeckers.
VSO Summer Field Trip Front Royal, VA
June 15-17, 2012
Come join us June 15-17 for the VSO summer field trip as we visit some of the best birding areas around Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley! The varied topography and the river valley offer a wide variety of habitats and bird species. Field trips will be offered Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning. More details here »
2012 VSO Foray
June 9 — June 17, 2012 in Loudoun County
The upcoming 2012 foray will be held from June 9, 2012 to June 17, 2012 in Loudoun County, located in northern Virginia. The coming foray is being done to support the 2009 to 2013 Loudoun County Bird Atlas, organized by the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy. For more information on protocols or to see training materials, check the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy website. The Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy will hold a training session during the next VSO board meeting, held in Loudoun County, on March 25, 2012. The board meeting will be held at Audubon Naturalist Society’s Rust Nature Sanctuary on the western edge of Leesburg, VA. For directions to the sanctuary click here. Training starts at 12pm and lasts approximately an hour. That will be a good opportunity for those interested in volunteering to learn more about how to complete atlas blocks. If interested in helping with the foray or attending the training session on March 25th, contact Elisa Enders at elisaenders_AT_hotmail.com or 757-879-1034.
New VARCOM Secretary
The Virginia Avian Records Committee has a new secretary. The VSO Board would like to extend its recognition and gratitude to Amy Gilmer for her several years of exceptionally hard work and dedication as the VSO's VARCOM secretary. She has stepped down, and Wendy Ealding has volunteered to be the new secretary. Thanks to Wendy for taking on this important position. Please submit any review species reports to Wendy Ealding.
Adopt an Important Bird Area
The Important Bird Areas (IBA) Program is an international bird conservation program being implemented on every continent, with 48 states participating in the United States. The aim of the program is to identify a network of sites that are essential for sustaining naturally occurring populations of bird species, and to protect or manage these sites for the long-term conservation of birds, other wildlife, and their habitats. For a site to be recognized as an IBA it must meet criteria based on bird concentrations, threatened species, or species assemblages representative of priority habitats. The Virginia IBA Program was initiated in 2002 and has been making great progress toward greater protection of our state’s vulnerable bird species. IBA identification in Virginia has produced 20 IBAs (as of November 2009) that represent our state’s very best bird habitat. It’s now time to work to protect these areas and you can help!
Local community members can play a vital role in furthering the goals of the IBA program. Through the Adopt an IBA initiative, a local group (such as an Audubon chapter, bird club, school group, etc.) adopts an IBA and participates as a group to further conservation, monitoring, or advocacy efforts on the site. Involvement can include organizing a monitoring effort, clean-up day, education program, or habitat improvement project or advocating for the IBA in the political arena. Adopting an IBA can help in the conservation of the site by raising awareness about the importance of the site and building a local group of constituents that care about it. The IBA Adoption Group Guidelines can be downloaded here » 84 KB MS Word® Doc.
Please note that it may be possible to receive a Virginia Society of Ornithology Conservation Grant to help support IBA Adoption efforts. Please visit the VSO Conservation Commiittee page for more information.
What is eBird?
A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales.
VSO’s Principles of Birding Ethics
In the Fall 2008 issue of the Virginia Society of Ornithology newsletter, VSO President David Spears said, “In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton and Madison wrote, 'If men were angels, no government would be necessary.' But men aren't angels, they went on to argue, and therefore we need rules to govern our behavior. What about birders? Are we all angels? Do we need rules?”
President Spears' article continued on this idea of rules for birding and defining ethical birding behavior. The Virginia Society of Ornithology recently adopted a set of principles for birding ethically. The VSO has been considering the issues related to birding ethics for the past year. These issues have been discussed at length on the VA-Bird listserv, in emails, at VSO board meetings and field trips, in the VSO newsletter and who knows where else. Birding organizations across the country and the world are considering or have enacted similar policies. Many organizations have adopted the American Birding Association's code of birding ethics. The VSO's Principles of Birding Ethics are based on this ABA code. The VSO hopes these are guidelines that birders in Virginia will support and abide by. Please share copies of the principles with your birding friends. Download VSO's Principles of Birding Ethics ...>>