The Annual Meeting for the Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge held their annual meeting tonight. Betsy and I are supporters of the organization and hope to increase our involvement in the coming years, so we often attend their meetings. However, when we received the flyer for the meeting we were especially excited.
The speaker for the evening was Stephen Brown. Stephen is the director of the Shorebird Research Conservation Program at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. He’s also Betsy’s cousin. We have not had the opportunity to see Stephen in quite a number of years, so it was pretty cool to have him “come to us” so to speak.
In the “it’s a small world” department, the refuge directory, Libby Herland, also knew Stephen as a doctoral student at Cornell (she helped fund one of his early projects).
Stephen’s talk was rather sobering. Through our family we’ve heard bits and pieces of his adventures in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. With the fate of the refuge currently hanging in the balance of politics in Washington, it was scary to see what was at stake. Stephen was pretty dispassionate about the oil situation — we need it as a society — but the cost to this critical piece of slice of Alaska seems to to simply not worth the incredibly small bump in oil reserves that drilling in the refuge would provide. There’s a lot of “heat” in the debate around the refuge, but very little light. So Stephen (and a team of talented researchers, writers, and photographers) put together a book that helps illuminate what is at cost.
Arctic Wings tells the stories of the birds that migrate each year to this remote part of Alaska to nest and breed. While the book covers a number of bird families, Stephen’s talk naturally centered more around shorebirds. It truly was amazing to hear the journeys that sandpipers, golden plovers, and hundreds of other species take each year — linking together various ecosystems spanning the globe and spanning the seasons. The other connection is to us — we each have an impact on the fate of these birds, either through the politics of oil or the impact of global warming. I’ve only read a few stories in the book so far, but all of them tell how they were profoundly changed by visiting the refuge and seeing what was at stake. They’ve told their story. Now it is time for us to listen, learn, and act.
For more information about the book and the project visit arcticwings.org