BY KAREN BOSSICK
The Community Library, which is coming off of a stellar week of lectures that filled every seat in the lecture hall, has three more presentations designed to capture audiences this week.
- John W. Fitzpatrick will talk about “How Birds Can Save the World” at 4 p.m. (NOTE THE TIME) Monday, July 22.
Fitzpatrick is the director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where he pioneered the development of citizen science. He and his colleagues, for instance, developed eBird, an internet-based platform that has become the world’s largest citizen-science project and a revolutionary, global standard for ecological monitoring.
Fitzpatrick himself is known for his research work on the South American avifauna and the conservation of the once-endangered Florida scrub jay.
He will present new, remarkable data about bird populations gleaned from unexpected sources. And he will show how birds and citizen science can help us understand how humans and nature can coexist more stably.
- Kit Fischer, senior program manager for the National Wildlife Federation and author of “Paddling Montana,” will discuss “Resolving Wildlife Conflicts in the Sawtooth Valley” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 24.
Fischer works with the National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Conflict Resolution Program based in Missoula, Mont. It has successfully helped eliminate conflicts on more than 1.3 million acres of public lands in the West during the past 15 years, while protecting grizzly bears, wolves, bighorn sheep, trout and salmon.
The Federation’s Adopt-A-Wildlife Acre program addresses conflicts between livestock and wildlife with a voluntary, market-based approach. It offers ranchers a fair price in exchange for their agreement to retire their public land grazing leases.
More than 1.2 million acres of vital habitat for wildlife has been secured through this program, including some connected landscapes in the Sawtooth Valley.
- Michael Ames, co-author of “American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S Tragedy in Afghanistan,” will discuss his book, which follows the case of former Hailey resident Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 25.
The former Wood River Valley resident co-wrote the book with Matt Farwell, a former Army infantryman who fought in the same province where Bergdahl disappeared. The book is an easy read for the most part, with tidbits readers might not have learned elsewhere.
Ames will talk about why military and government sources decided to speak out and why the story still matters.