Suds & Science season is back! VCE's informal science discussion series is held once a month (January-May & November) at the Norwich Inn. Stimulate all of your senses, beverage in hand, while listening to cutting-edge science fireside. In these informal talks (no PowerPoint!), we cover anything that crawls, slithers, walks, hops, flies or just sits there during the course of our field work. As we like to say, "You buy the beverage, we bring the science." Check out the upcoming schedule, read about or watch some of the past talks below.
2017 Schedule (all talks from 7-8 pm)
January 10: Bridget Butler [Cold Hollow to Canada], WildPaths - Roadways & Wildlife Connectivity Watch Bridget's talk here.
February 7: Len Reitsma [Plymouth State University], Thirty Years of Avian Studies & Stories
March 7: Aaron Weed [National Park Service], Bugs, Aliens, and New England’s Forests
Watch Aaron's talk here.
April 4: Jeff Kerby [Dartmouth College], Tracking the Ecology of a Changing Arctic
May 2: Bess Koffman [Dartmouth College], Using Ice Cores to Understand Past Climate
November 11: TBD
Past Talks
Thirty years of avian studies & stories
February 07, 2017Dr. Len Reitsma, Professor of Zoology at Plymouth State University, is one of the most colorful personalities around in the ornithological world. Len will interweave his stories and scientific discoveries over the last 30 years into an entertaining and informative evening of a behind-the-scenes look at the life of an avian ecologist and the migrating bird species that he studies.
WildPaths
January 10, 2017Bridget Butler, AKA 'Bird Diva', gives us more than we thought we would ever want to know about roadkill in Vermont. Bridget, Program Director at Cold Hollow to Canada, discussed her innovative citizen science initiative, WildPaths, created to understand how wildlife move across the landscape. We'll never look at roadkill (through your car window) the same way again, and you might just be persuaded to stop and snap a photograph to submit to WildPaths. Watch a video of the presentation. »
Introducing Homo naledi (click for video)
November 01, 2016Suds & Science returned to the Norwich Inn on Tuesday, November 1st at 7pm. Paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, introduced us to Homo naledi - a new human ancestor from the cradle of humankind in South Africa. Jeremy has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda, early human fossils in Museums throughout eastern and South Africa, and his anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage. Didn't make it to the program? Watch it here! »
The White-winged Diuca-Finch
May 10, 2016Only one bird species is known to regularly nest on glaciers. The White-winged Diuca-Finch (Diuca speculifera) is not a species of the polar regions, but of very high elevations in the tropics. In the 1950s, diucas were sighted going into a Bolivian glacier at night to roost. Since then very little has been published, and little is known about the species. Beginning in 2003, we have been observing this species in Peru at Quelccaya Ice Cap, the largest tropical glacier on Earth. By 2008 we were able to publish information about the nests they built on the glacier, although not until 2014 did we find active nests. This month we are returning to Quelccaya on a mission to learn more about diucas, as part of a quasi-secret, two-week effort to document every aspect of their lives on film. Our presentation will discuss the excitement and complications of such work, at elevations over 17,000 feet. And if it isn't difficult and risky enough to anticipate the breeding season and document a species for which almost nothing is known, the Quelccaya region has been strongly impacted by the 2015-16 El Niño event. With warmer-than-normal conditions, and snow accumulation at 29% of normal for early April, will the birds nest earlier? Will this be a particularly successful breeding season for diucas? What will we learn about the many other species inhabiting the wetlands around Quelccaya? Join us for answers to these questions and more, just days after our return from Peru!
Where the Bobolink Meets the Booby
February 02, 2016The Galapagos conjures images of giant tortoises, Blue-footed Boobies, and Darwin's famous finches. But Darwin also had in his collection an iconic bird from North America's grasslands: a Bobolink. Each year just a couple dozen migrating Bobolinks stop in the Galapagos, where they are now suspects in the transmission of a blood parasite, avian malaria, to endemic Galapagos birds. VCE Conservation Biologist Roz Renfrew and farmer Jen Megyesi will share with you their adventures in one of the world's greatest natural treasures, as they search for a needle in a haystack (and with needles in hand): Bobolink blood.
Fracking and Wildlife
January 12, 2016Natural gas extraction from shale formations in Appalachia, already a contentious political issue, also raises concerns about the loss of wildlife habitat. As a post-doctoral researcher, VCE biologist Jason Hill and colleagues used the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) to assess the effects of habitat loss on forest interior and grassland bird species in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Join Dr. Jason Hill, a quantitative biologist and ornithologist at VCE, and learn about this issue and his work.
Sex, Drugs and Bees: plant chemistry and pollinators
September 09, 2015Many plants rely on flower visits by pollinators such as bees in order to reproduce. When bees consume nectar and pollen, they must cope with naturally occurring plant secondary chemicals, substances usually associated with plants' defense against herbivores. Why would plants expose their pollinators to these chemicals? How do they affect bee health? And what are the consequences of plant chemistry for pollination of wild and cultivated plants? Leif's talk will draw on his research in Vermont exploring effects of plant chemicals on bumble bee--parasite interactions and bee foraging behavior. He'll also address the importance of wild bees to agriculture and ongoing efforts to halt their decline. Dr. Leif Richardson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. He previously completed a PhD at Dartmouth College and served as State Lands Ecologist with the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. He contributed to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies Bumble Bee Atlas project. He lives in Montpelier. Watch the lecture »
Presettlement Forests of New England
May 05, 2015Charlie Cogbill has spent a large part of his career studying a forest that no longer exists: the pre-settlement forest in New England and New York. His primary research tools are archives, located in town halls and other repositories, of land surveys made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of these archives contain “lotting” surveys – the survey by which the proprietors of a new town divided the town into lots, which were then sold or granted to the earliest settlers. At each lot corner, the surveyors tended to place a monument, often a post or stake or a pile of stones. They also routinely made mention of a nearby “witness tree.” Through statistical analysis and a reliance on his background in field ecology, he has been able to paint a detailed and localized picture of what the forests of New England and New York looked like back when those forests were being settled by Europeans. Watch his lecture »
Revisiting Loons
April 07, 2015Building upon one of our most popular Suds & Science topics to date, VCE loon biologist Eric Hanson will host April's Suds & Science program. Just back from a regional meeting of loon biologists and managers, Eric will share new research on migration, translocation experiments, red-throated loons, social chaos, and lead toxicity. Where the stories will go from there is anyone’s guess, but it is sure to be an entertaining evening full of lively discussion. We hope you will join us! Watch Eric's lecture »
No one ever steps into the same river twice, and yet...
March 03, 2015A river is an example of a dynamic, ‘self-forming’ feature in the natural landscape or, perhaps more poetically, ‘a carpenter of its own ever-changing edifice’. As such, rivers have captured the interest and imagination of physicists throughout the history of modern scientific thought. Understanding the links between form and process in rivers is especially important today: consider that approximately one-third of all humans currently lives within 3km of a non-urban river; about two-thirds lives within 10km of a non-urban river. As important features of the human environment, rivers have been subjected to increasing demands and disturbance to a breathtaking degree: worldwide, there are currently about 40,000 dams with heights greater than 15m. A dammed river is a discontinuous river, with implications for the movement of sediment and contaminants to the sea, as well as for the health of fisheries and floodplain environments. Now, many existing dams are coming to the end of their useful lives, and our climate is changing. Making informed societal choices faced with these developments requires an understanding of rivers at the most fundamental level: What controls the predictable form of an unregulated river channel? How does the form of a river change with dam emplacement and dam removal? Will river channels change dramatically with a changing climate? Learn about some of the research pursued by Dartmouth scientists and students who address these questions and more. Brian Dade will lead this discussion. Brian is Chair of the Earth Sciences Department at Dartmouth College, and a member of the VCE Board of Trustees.
Chasing the Rain Crow
February 03, 2015Mangrove Cuckoo is an iconic bird of the West Indies and the coastal forests of southern Florida. Widely collected by early naturalists and prized by current-day birders, this species has a rich cultural history. It has been portrayed by Audubon and featured on coins and stamps throughout the islands of the Caribbean. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most poorly known birds of North America. VCE's Director of Science, John Lloyd, has spent the past 7 years digging through museum trays and wandering the mangroves in an attempt to shed light on the natural history and evolution of this notoriously secretive species. Join us as John shares a story of taxonomy gone awry, the value of natural history, and the challenge of gaining new insights into old questions.
Cockatoos Down Under
January 20, 2015As cold settles in the Upper Valley and Vermont is blanketed with a thick coating of white powder, join Judith Scarl at the Norwich Inn for some bright pink, squawking, Down Under intrigue. Now the director of two broad-scale citizen science initiatives focusing on North American songbirds, Judith once devoted great lengths of time to chasing Australian cockatoos throughout city parks to record their vocalizations, climbing brittle eucalyptus trees to keep tabs on baby parrots, and attempting to avoid brawling kangaroos as she trapped galahs in fields shared with these sprawling marsupials. Judith will discuss cockatoo natural history and behavior, delve into why parrots are such good mimics both in captivity and in the wild, and regale you with stories of working with a species that has almost as good a sense of humor as we do.
What's With Whip-poor-wills?
November 04, 2014VCE biologist Sara Zahendra reports on Vermont's most enchanting goatsucker. Once a common sound on moonlit nights, the Eastern Whip-poor-will has declined over the last several decades and was recently listed as threatened in Vermont. Sara will describe VCE's "whip" survey in western Vermont and what's being done to monitor these aerial insectivores. Watch a video of this presentation from CATV 8/10 »
