Friends of Merrymeeting Bay’s sixth presentation of its 26th annual Winter Speaker Series, My Life for the Birds & Bats, is scheduled to feature retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Senior Wildlife Biologist Al Manville.

FOMB’s Winter Speaker Series presentations are again being held via Zoom and are accessible via hyperlink at the top of fomb.org. This event takes place at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 8.

Structures such as communication towers, commercial wind turbines, utility-scale solar facilities, power transmission and distribution lines, building glass and windows, and lighting and commercial fishing gear can result in serious consequences to migratory birds and other wildlife. These include collisions, disorientation, barotrauma, electrocution, entanglement, attraction, habitat disturbance and fragmentation, according to a news release from Ed Friedman, chair of the FOMB Steering Committee.

Manville will discuss these structures and their impacts — including at the population level — on efforts to work with the related industries and best practices available to avoid or minimize negative consequences. He will also discuss the recent interest and growing public awareness involving impacts from non-thermal, non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation to wildlife.

Manville has served as a senior lecturer/adjunct professor for the Advanced Academic Programs’ Environmental Sciences and Policy Division at Johns Hopkins University for 22 years, teaching classroom and field classes in ecology, terrestrial and marine conservation biology, and wildlife management. Additionally, he served as a branch chief and as the senior wildlife biologist with the Division of Migratory Bird Management, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, for 17 years as its national lead on anthropocentric causes of bird mortality from structures, including impacts from radiation, collision, and electrocution.

Manville chaired the Communication Tower Working Group, a wind turbine working group, and a waterbird bycatch working group. He co-chaired the Interagency Seabird Working Group, represented the Service on the Wildlife Workgroup of the National Wind Coordinating Collaborative, on the Avian Power Line Interaction Committee, was a technical scientific advisor to the Wind Energy Federal Advisory Committee, and was the service’s technical advisor to the Bird-Safe Glass Working Group.

He has studied and handled more than 100 black bears; assessed brown bear-human interactions in Alaska; conducted six summers of field research in the Aleutian Islands on the impacts of marine debris on seabirds, sea lions, and seals; and studied impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on seabirds for five years.

The Winter Speaker Series runs October through May, on the second Wednesday of each month. The FOMB April 12th presentation, “Agro-acoustics: Listening to the Sounds of Soils,” will feature University of Liverpool Assistant Professor of Marine Biology Louise Roberts. This event takes place at 7 p.m., with the Zoom registration link available at fomb.org about a week prior to the presentation.

Speaker series presentations are free and open to the public. Visit the website to see speaker biographies, full event schedules, video recordings of past presentations, become a member, and learn more about how to help protect Merrymeeting Bay and the Gulf of Maine.

For more information, contact Friends of Merrymeeting Bay at 207-666-3372 or edfomb@comcast.net.

 

 

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