Programs & Main Events

NJ butterflies and their Host Plant with Sharon Wander

April 11, 2023 7:30 PM

Sharon Wander, along with her husband, Wade, is a self-employed environmental consultant, providing wetland delineation and permitting services and conducting surveys for Endangered and Threatened species. She has long been an active New Jersey naturalist, interested in birds, herptiles, plants, and butterflies (as well as moths and other insects). Sharon is a past president of the New Jersey Butterfly Club, and served on the 2014 NJDEP committee that evaluated the conservation status of the state’s butterfly species. The Wanders’ Fredon Township butterfly garden has attracted a state-record 84 species.

Moths!

May 9, 2023 7:30 PM

Wade Wander, along with his wife, Sharon, is a partner in Wander Ecological Consultants, investigating wetlands and conducting surveys for Endangered and Threatened species. He has been an active New Jersey naturalist since childhood, interested in birds, reptiles and amphibians, plants, and butterflies (and of course, moths and other insects). He is a past president of the New Jersey Butterfly Club, for which he is a frequent speaker and field-trip leader. At the moth station he runs at their home in Sussex County, Wade has recorded more than 1100 species of moths since 2001.

“The man who loved birds”, presentation on the book by James Thomas Huffstodt

June 13, 2023 at 7:30 pm

“Chapman was a great ornithologist… He loved birds. He loved them as Audubon loved them. He also loved them as St. Francis loved them.” Guy Emerson, Audubon Society, 1949. Dr. Frank M. Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City was the father of the Christmas Bird Count but was also the most popular bird writer of his era, an influential editor, South American explorer, museum innovator, pioneer bio-geographer, educator, early bird photographer, spell-binding speaker, author of 17 books and several hundred popular and scientific articles, and owner-editor of Bird-Lore (1899-1934): the first popular magazine for birdwatchers and forerunner of today’s Audubon. Some have called him the father of the modern American birdwatching (birding) movement.

This self-taught bird man left an imperishable legacy as a daring pioneer ornithologist whose adventures included dodging rattlesnakes and tornados in frontier Texas, barely surviving a savage Caribbean hurricane aboard a small sailing craft, negotiating with armed revolutionaries in the South American jungle, and riding mule back along narrow, treacherous trails high in the Andes mountains. A close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt he spent 54-years at the American Museum of Natural History winning many laurels for his landmark contributions to the museum and ornithology. His life story is the history of American ornithology from 1886 through 1942—an epic era of enormous change and memorable achievement.