Monthly Club Meeting – “Sparrows Simplified: Making Sense of LBJ’s”

Club Meeting – North Museum of Nature and Science, 400 College Ave, Lancaster, PA 17603

Presented by Michael Moore, retired Biology professor and past president of the Delaware Ornithological Society 

Many birders struggle with identifying sparrows, referring to them as LBJ’s (little brown jobs) or sparrow sp. This talk will help you tackle this difficult group. It will discuss and then attempt to blend the two main approaches to identification, the Peterson System and the Cape May School, to lead you to sparrow identification confidence. Each of the 16 species of regularly occurring sparrows in this area will be compared and contrasted with some discussion of finding and identifying rarities.

Mike is a retired Biology Professor and a past president of the Delaware Ornithological Society. He started birding in middle school in Massachusetts and has had a life longpassion for birds. He completed his PhD at the University of Washington on the field endocrinology of White-crowned Sparrows. After doing a postdoc at the University of Texas in Austin, he served on the Biology Faculty at Arizona State University for 27 years.  He moved to the University of Delaware in in 2009 where he retired after 11 years. He has been funded throughout his career by the National Science Foundation and the Nation Institutes of Health and has published nearly 100 papers in scientific journals. He also has a passion for dragonflies and serves as a Vice President for the Dragonfly Society of the Americas.