Wednesday, January 24th at 7:00pm
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Hawaiian Honeycreepers and the Conservation Crisis – Past, Present and Future
A group of rose finches from central Asia migrated over the Pacific Ocean, thus irrupting, as finches tend to do, 6,000 miles, landing on Hawaii more than 5 million years ago. This may have happened a few times. These finches found unique foods and habitats, and they adaptively radiated to dozens of species. This is similar to the story of Darwin’s finches, and these rose finches adaptively radiated into more 50 new species that exploited these food resources.
After settlers arrived, rats, cats, pigs, mongooses, invasive plants, diseases, and the most current threat, mosquitos carrying avian malaria, were introduced. From a high of 53-56 species, now only 16 remain. New efforts are being done to help the last remaining species.
The Finch Research Network and The Honeycreepers Project
Matt Young, FiRN Founder and Executive Director
Matt has been observing and enjoying nature since a very young age. He’s lived in Central New York for 26+ years and it was during this time when he really started studying everything from birds to orchids, and bogs and fens. Matt received his B.S. in Water Resources with a minor in Meteorology from SUNY-Oneonta and his M.S. in Ornithology from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry/Syracuse University in 2003. Matt did his masters research on avian diversity in restored wetlands of central New York at the Great Swamp Conservancy. He was a Regional Editor of the Kingbird for 10 years, the state ornithological journal in New York, was an Adjunct Professor in Environmental Studies at SUNY-Cortland, and currently teaches an Intro to Birding class for Cornell University and was the Board Chair at The Wetland Trust.
Over the last 26 years he’s worked as a social worker (and is currently) with special needs young adults and adolescents for close to 12 years, and worked at the Cornell Lab across 15+ years where he did extensive field work for the Lab’s Cerulean and Golden-winged Warblers atlas projects, and was project lead on the Lab’s first Finch Irruptive Bird Survey for Bird Source in 1999. He was the Collections Management Leader/Audio Engineer at the Macaulay Library ~12 years where he edited sounds for several Merlin packs around the world in addition to being the lead audio engineer on guides, the Songs of the Warblers of North America, Audubon Society Voices of Hawaii’s Birds, and the Cornell Lab’s Guides to Bird Sounds, the North America Master and Essential Sets. He’s been a tour guide leader for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, written finch species accounts for breeding bird atlases and Birds of the World, and has published several papers about the Red Crossbill vocal complex including describing a new call type Type 12. He’s currently working on Finches of United States and Canada with Lillian Stokes and is also the President and Founder of the Finch Research Network (FiRN).
Nathan Goldberg, FiRN Hawaiian Honeycreeper Project Lead
Nathan Goldberg is a graduate of Cornell University, and a tour leader and guide for the Red Hill Birding team. He is an avid birder for over a decade and from the Chicagoland region. In 2020, he set the Illinois Big Year record, seeing 341 species over the course of the year. After leading a trip in Hawaii in 2021 he reached out to Matt to get involved in helping raise awareness around the conservation crisis in Hawaii.
To learn more about the Honeycreepers Project, click here.