Mallards

The Potomac Valley Audubon Society will sponsor a presentation about wintering waterbirds the evening of January 13 at the National Conservation Training Center outside Shepherdstown.

The speaker will be a leading expect on the subject: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service migratory bird biologist Doug Forsell.

He will focus on wintering waterbird populations trends and conservation efforts in the Chesapeake Bay and Mid-Atlantic coastal waters.

The program will be held at 7 p.m. in Room 151 of the Center’s Instructional West Building.

Admission will be free and anyone is welcome to attend.

Forsell has studied migratory birds for more than three decades, mostly with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

After earning a Master’s Degree in Wildlife Management from California State University Humbolt, he spent ten years in Alaska primarily studying the at-sea distribution and abundance of marine birds. He spent four years as the refuge manager of five remote tropical Pacific islands where he studied breeding biology of tropical seabirds.

Since moving to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay Field Office in 1990, Forsell’s major activities have been focused on interpretation of waterfowl population trends, surveys of waterbirds in offshore waters of the Chesapeake Bay, assessing the mortality of waterbirds in anchored gillnets, modeling diving duck distributions, and identifying threats to birds and their habitats and promoting their restoration.

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