Among friends in Portland

Hello from Portland, Oregon, everyone.

I'm in the beautiful Pacific Northwest -- far from the Birder's World offices, far from the all-Brett-all-the-time coverage of the Wisconsin local news -- at the annual gathering of the American Ornithologists' Union, which is meeting with the Cooper Ornithological Society and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower until Friday, August 8.

And I'm a happy camper.

Many friends are here. Just to name a few: Julie Craves, supervisor of avian research at the Rouge River Bird Observatory and author of our popular column Since You Asked; woodpecker expert, Ivory-bill skeptic, and longtime magazine contributor Jerry Jackson; and Peter Stettenheim, founding editor of the series that became the Birds of North America and the author of the incredible article about feather functions that appeared in our June 2006 issue. It's great to see people you would otherwise communicate with only by e-mail.

And it's great to be surrounded by so many bird people, so many smart bird people doing fascinating research. Don't know if you ever realized it, but a fair number of the articles that have run in Birder's World started out as presentations delivered at an AOU meeting. Future articles may originate here this week.

Unlike at recent past meetings, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker isn't on the program. What were topics of discussion this morning were genetics, disease, and the conservation of Hawaiian birds, the subject of the day's plenary lecture delivered by Robert C. Fleischer, head of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics.

Also on the program were applications of stress endocrinology; the use of radio tracking in ecological studies; free-ranging cats and bird conservation; the influence of noise on birds and bird studies; brood parasitism; foraging; and several other symposia.

In case you can't tell, this is one big meeting: about a thousand attendees and enough 15- and 30-minute PowerPoint presentations to be organized into -- count 'em! -- eight concurrent sessions that run from 10 am until 5:30 pm every day. The hour-long 8 am plenary lectures start things off. Galapagos researcher Helen Grant (of Beak of the Finch fame) will speak tomorrow morning. Her topic: “Why Species Multiply.” 

Here's the abstract:

Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the “Origin of Species,” in which Darwin established the scientific basis for understanding how evolution occurs by natural selection. Darwin was less clear about the actual process of species formation. Nevertheless, he envisioned a three-step process: colonization, involving the expansion of a population into a new environment; divergence, when populations become adapted to novel environmental conditions through natural selection; and finally, the formation of a barrier to interbreeding between divergent lineages. He showed characteristic insight by suggesting that investigations of what we now call “very young adaptive radiations” might provide windows through which we can view the processes involved. Since Darwin’s time, insights from the fields of genetics, behavior and ecology have continued to illuminate how and why species evolve. In this talk, I will discuss the progress that has been made in our understanding of speciation with special reference to the young radiation of Darwin’s Finches.

I'm looking forward to it. I'll try to post a few pictures tomorrow. --C.H.