Menunkatuck Audubon's September meeting will feature Adventures in Tracking Invertebrates with Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney in the Blackstone Library Auditorium.

For forty days and forty nights, naturalists Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney traveled the continent. They returned with thousands of photographs, not of Yosemite's grand vistas or Yellowstone's bison herds, but of tiny eggs stuck to flagpoles, origami made by beetles, and the artfully crafted portable houses of caddisfly larvae. The trip was field work for their new book, Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates, which won the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award for best nature guidebook. Egg cases, cocoons, galls, leaf mines, burrows, nests, and many other curiosities are illustrated in the book's pages. In this talk, the authors will show images of exquisite invertebrate-created objects, discuss mind-boggling natural history, and share amusing anecdotes from their eccentric journeys. Professional entomologists and bug-haters alike have found themselves rolling with laughter and staring in horrified fascination during this entertaining presentation.

Charley Eiseman conducts plant and wildlife surveys for various nonprofits, state agencies, and universities throughout his native Massachusetts and in neighboring states. He holds an MS from the University of Vermont's Field Naturalist Program and a BS in wildlife and fisheries conservation and management from the University of Massachusetts. He is an extreme generalist with a passion for learning about all living things and their interconnections.

Noah Charney, PhD, has conducted field research on amphibians, mammals, birds, and a variety of conservation issues. He is an author of several wildlife conservation journal articles and recently defended a dissertation in salamander terrestrial ecology as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Switzer Environmental Fellow. He is currently teaching a course on rare species conservation at Hampshire College. Together, he and Charley have taught many workshops on animal tracking over the past decade. From his Tennessee roots to his time in California and Massachusetts, Noah has trained as a naturalist to understand and celebrate natural diversity.         

Copies of their book will be available for $40 after the program.

    
Program is free and open to the public.  Refreshments served. For info contact Cindi at 203-457-1699 or program@menunkatuck.org.