Connecticut Audubon Society Presents Annual Award to Phil Donahue

Connecticut Audubon Society presented television personality and film producer Phil Donahue, a former Westport, Ct., resident, with its annual volunteer award for his dedication to helping restore the state’s population of Purple Martins, a threatened species, at its 116th annual meeting, Thursday, October 2, in New Haven.

Milan Bull, Connecticut Audubon’s senior director of science and conservation, credited the colonies on Donahue’s former waterfront property, and the website he established with streaming video of nesting martins, for inspiring a surge in interest in martins across the state.

When Connecticut Audubon Society first helped Donahue erect a martin colony, in 2002, there were only seven martin colonies in the state. But, Bull said, thanks largely to the publicity Donahue helped bring to the Purple Martins’ plight, individuals, non-profit organizations and government agencies have continued to put up nest boxes and gourds, and there are now approximately 40 Purple Martin colonies in Connecticut.

For his dedication to Purple Martins, Donahue was given Connecticut Audubon Society’s annual Dave Engelman Volunteers Benchmark Award. Bull presented him with a certificate and a hand-carved Purple Martin created by David Farrington, of Fairfield.

Ralph Wood of Glastonbury, chairman of Connecticut Audubon’s Board of Directors, presided over the meeting, which also featured a 2014 Year In Review by Connecticut Audubon President Alexander Brash of the year’s achievements. More than 100 people from around the state attended the meeting, which was held at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven.

Preceding the award, Pete Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington D.C., gave a keynote talk about how the lack of knowledge about “migratory connectivity” – where birds that nest in the north spend the winter and where they stop on migration – is limiting our ability to effectively conserve those birds.

In the 1980s Marra was on the conservation staff of Connecticut Audubon Society. His talk was called, “The Missing Pieces: The Importance of Full Life-Cycle Biology for the Conservation of Migratory Birds.”

Marra said that knowing migratory connectivity is essential to fundamental biology and conservation. Without it, we don’t know where and why populations die, we don’t understand population dynamics, and we don’t know what threats populations are vulnerable to.

“We have lost our way with how we interpret the ecology and evolution of many species of birds because we aren’t doing it in the context of the annual cycle,” he said.

He described research he and his associates are doing on American Redstarts that shows that birds that winter in Caribbean mangrove swamps, which receive abundant rainfall and have plenty of insects for the birds to eat, have greater nesting success in North America than birds that spend the winter in drier scrub habitat in the Caribbean.

Their research shows that rainfall on their wintering grounds affects body weight, food availability and migration dates, and leads to a higher number of successful nestings on the redstarts’ North American breeding grounds. The implication is that conservation of areas of heavy rainfall in the Caribbean is essential to the conservation of American Redstarts.