Minutes – May 22, 2024 | Delaware Valley Ornithological Club

This meeting was entirely focused on a special program presented by the DVOC with support from the Academy of Natural Sciences. No other club business was conducted in this meeting.

Evening Program

Kenn Kaufman gave a talk entitled “Center of the Bird World: Audubon and his Rivals in Philadelphia”. This presentation was intended to introduce his new book, “The Birds That Audubon Missed”.

The venue for the presentation was the main Auditorium in the Academy. The audience began to gather around 6 PM. At 6:30 PM, Marina McDougall welcomed the audience, and acknowledged the help of the DVOC and colleagues in the Academy who helped organize the event. She was followed by Barb Bassett, who introduced the DVOC and Bird Philly to the audience and welcomed Kenn Kaufman. Finally, Navin Sasikumar introduced Kenn with a brief retrospective of his many contributions.

Kenn tailored the presentation to be particularly relevant to the Philadelphia audience. After Kenn concluded his presentation, he and Jason Weckstein held a fireside chat to discuss some of Kenn’s findings and to entertain questions from the audience. There were 74 people in the audience and 42 viewers had logged in on-line to listen to the presentation. At the end of the Q&A session, Kenn signed copies of his new book and others that had been brought in by members of the audience. The books were sourced from Head House Books, a local independent bookstore.

DVOC would like to thank the ANS AV staff for the excellent Zoom visuals and the recording of the event. A link to the recording is shown below:

Center of the Bird World: Audubon and his Rivals in Philadelphia – Kenn Kaufman (May 22, 2024)

The evening culminated in a dinner at the “Kite and Key” where 14 club members joined Kenn for an evening meal. The meeting adjourned at the end of dinner.