Bird expert, author to address Audubon Society
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On Monday, February 6, at 7 p.m., the Northern Neck Audubon Society will host a program titled “Miss Hathaway and Her Kind: Images of Birders in U.S. Popular Culture.” The public is invited to this program at Grace Episcopal Church in Kilmarnock. Refreshments will be served.
Birders have been on-screen since the beginning of moving pictures to the latest television sit-com. What sort of roles, appearances and plot functions do birders have, and how might these influence the perception of birders (and, by extension, bird conservation) in U.S. culture?
Ned Brinkley, formerly a professor of literature and film studies at the University of Virginia, has spent a decade researching these questions. He will present his thoughts on the subject with extensive clips of media from 1930 through 2005.
Dr. Edward (Ned) S. Brinkley is the author of the National Wildlife Federations’ “Field Guide to the Birds of North America” and is the editor of North American Birds, the American Birding Association’s quarterly journal of ornithological record. Along with Steve Rottenborn, he is the author of the “Virginia Society of Ornithology’s Virginia Birdlife: An Annotated Checklist.”
A native of Norfolk, Dr. Brinkley has birded since age 6, his interest sparked by the southern warblers of the Great Dismal Swamp and, later, by the seabirds of the Gulf Stream off of North Carolina. For Field Guides Inc., he has guided birding tours to Africa, the Caribbean, Iceland, Portugal, Mexico, Central America and Antarctica. He currently lives in Cape Charles, with “a half beagle and a feral cat.”
