When

October 17, 2024    
7:15 pm - 9:30 pm
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Where

Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia

Event Type

The speaker is remote. The in-person portion of the meeting will be held at the Academy of Natural Sciences, BEES classroom (3rd floor).

Meeting agenda:
7:15 PM:  Zoom opens
7:30-8 PM: Club business
8 PM:  Presentation followed by questions (might start earlier if club business finishes earlier).

Please register for the meeting whether you will be attending in person or via Zoom. Then watch for the meeting link in your email. Disregard the meeting link if you will be attending in person.

Register here via Zoom

Return to the Sky: The Surprising Story of How One Woman and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle

Speaker: Tina Morris (remote)

In Return to the Sky, Tina Morris, one of the first women to engage in a raptor reintroduction program, shares her remarkable story that is as much about the human spirit as it is about birds of prey.
In the spring of 1975, on the eve of the US Bicentennial, Tina was selected to reintroduce Bald Eagles into New York State in the hope that the species could eventually repopulate eastern North America. Young and female in a male-dominated field, Tina was handed an assignment to rehabilitate a population that had been devastated by the effects of DDT. The challenges were prodigious―there was no model to emulate for a bird of the eagle’s size, for one―but Tina soon found that her own path to self-discovery and confidence-building was deeply connected with the survival of the species she was chosen to protect.
Ultimately, Tina spent two years playing “mother” to seven eaglets at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, east of Seneca Falls in New York. Driven by her passion, she discovered unknown reserves of patience, determination, and grit. At a time when the mass extinction of bird species is a critical global topic, Return to the Sky reminds us how, with a mix of common sense, resilience, and resolve, humans can be effective stewards of the natural world.
—–

 

Tina Morris completed her graduate work in ornithology and wildlife biology at Cornell in 1978, writing her thesis on the adaptations of hacking techniques to reintroduce Bald Eagles. Following her studies at Cornell, she worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nature Conservancy for several years, focusing on endangered species and critical habitat conservation, before embarking on a 23-year career teaching English and biology. Since her retirement in 2020, she has devoted her time to her own writing, especially creative non-fiction with a science or nature focus. Her short stories and non-fiction essays have appeared in Cognoscenti, LitBreak, Kestrel, and North by Northeast. Thirty years ago, with their four children in tow, she and her husband bought a farm in northern Massachusetts, which they manage as a wildlife sanctuary, promoting biodiversity and habitat protection for species in decline.

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