It started 123 years ago, with a proposal in a birding magazine to "count" birds on Christmas day instead of shooting them. Twenty-four birders heeded the call. Fast-forward to the present day and the Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is now the longest-running community science survey in the world, taking place each year from December 14 - January 5 and attracting over 70,000 volunteers across North and South America. In this talk, we'll discuss the origins of the CBC, the history of the Burlington count, and delve into the data to understand what the decades of records reveal about the birds we love to count.

Follow the link below to pre-register:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/history-of-the-burlington-christmas-bird-count-tickets-478808207237

About the Speaker: Laurence (Larry) Clarfeld
Larry is a postdoctoral associate with the Vermont Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. Larry has a diverse background, having received his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (UVM) and Master’s in Conservation Biology (Antioch University New England). He spent nearly a decade as a teacher-naturalist at North Branch Nature Center, connecting people with the natural world.

Larry completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Vermont in 2020 as a Graduate Fellow in the NSF IGERT Smart Grid program, with a certificate in Complex Systems. He developed methods for quantifying the risk to the power grid from cascading blackouts and created a model for understanding information flow in human conversation. As a postdoc, Larry will bring his AI and machine learning quantitative skills to monitoring wildlife by helping computers identify sounds and images of wildlife collected by cell phones, recorders, or camera traps with the R package, AMMonitor.

We hope you will be able to join! A recording of this event will be available after the presentation on our YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG38BOYzh5VkcQtCDp2GOfA) and Website (https://www.greenmountainaudubon.org/presentations-and-recordings).