Program Meetings

North America’s woodpeckers play keystone roles in our continent’s forests and woodlands. In fact, nowhere else on earth are woodpeckers such important contributors to forest ecology. Join local naturalist and woodpecker specialist Steve Shunk for an exciting journey into the lives and habits of North America’s woodpeckers. He will take listeners inside the woodpecker anatomy and translate anatomical adaptation into the fascinating behaviors birders love to watch. Prepare to be entertained, educated, and inspired to become ambassadors for woodpecker and woodland conservation.

Steve Shunk started birding in the San Francisco Bay area in 1989. He moved to central Oregon’s “Woodpecker Wonderland” in 1997, where 11 woodpecker species breed annually.

Award-winning photographer Paul Bannick will present a new program featuring video, sound, stories from the field, and several dozen new images from his brand-new book Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls. Paul uses intimate yet dramatic images to follow owls through the course of one year and in their distinct habitats.

We will witness the four seasons as each stage in an owl’s life is chronicled through rare images: courtship, mating, and nesting in spring; fledging and feeding of young in summer; dispersal and gaining independence in fall; and, finally, winter’s migrations and competitions for food. His program will show how owls use the unique resources available to them in each habitat to face those challenges. All 19 species found in Canada and the United States are featured in photos and narrative throughout the book, with a special focus on the Northern Pygmy-Owl, Great Gray Owl, Burrowing Owl, and Snowy Owl.

GABON, straddling the equator on the western coast of Africa, is part of the Congo Rainforest Biome. With some 80% of the nation covered in forest, Gabon was thrust into an enviable position in African conservation when in 2002 president Bongo inaugurated 13 national parks.

Stephen Sharnoff, nature photographer and research associate at UC Berkeley, is our featured guest at the April Program Meeting. He will give a presentation about a major new public-lands conservation initiative that he and Oregon conservationist Andy Kerr are leading. They have drafted a proposal for a national monument to the Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, to be located in the Santiam River watershed of the western Cascades.

John Sullivan and Laura Johnson will share photos from their 2013 adventure in Australia. They explored four distinct areas of the country: southeast Queensland, far north Queensland, Western Australia, and Northern Territory. Amazing birds, bizarre mammals, exotic reptiles and other fascinating critters made for an incredible journey across the spectacular landscapes of the Land Down Under. 

The LCAS Board was notified the morning of January 25 that our Program speaker, Tim Blount, Director of Friends of Malheur, had been snowed in on the East Coast and would not make it to Eugene for the next night’s Program Meeting. We decided we should stick with the topic of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge since it had become such a hot news item, even though last fall when we scheduled the Program we of course did not know that an armed occupation of the refuge would occur.