Harpy+Eagle+Audubon+Society+Meeting

I attended a meeting of the Audubon Society at the Museum of Natural History downtown on October 10 (“On Multiple Wings and a Prayer”). The meeting featured a speaker who works at UNCW in the Environmental Studies department, and has dedicated a lot of his time to researching ecosystems in Belize. The greater part of the meeting was spent with him presenting a presentation he had prepared about Harpy Eagles in Belize. I found out that although Harpy Eagles have been considered extinct in Belize for a long time, he and his conservation team have discovered a relatively large amount of individuals of the species over the past few years. He and his team, featuring many local people in Belize who had previously hunted birds and contributed to their endangerment, used several unconventional methods to track the birds. They used snails that they found to determine where the Harpy Eagles were nesting, and captured the nesting behaviors of the species, which was important because very few people have ever captured that on video. We got to see this during a portion of the meeting where the speaker was showing us a documentary that had been made about his team’s research in Belize. The meeting was overall very interesting, and I learned a lot of helpful information pertaining to APES. For example, I learned about the factors that helped cause Harpy Eagles to become endangered in the Belize ecosystem, as well as the environmental factors that currently allow the species to prosper in an unexpected environment. This relates to some of the first chapters that we read in the textbook and that were on the test, that talked about limiting factors and environmental conditions and how they relate to the prosperity of organisms living in ecosystems. The information is also relevant to Chapter 25 (what we just read and quizzed on), in that the speaker discussed the endangerment of species and biomes. Belize is a tropical rainforest biome, and there is a very diverse assortment of species that inhabit it. In addition to presenting about Harpy Eagles, the speaker showed us pictures of other birds that he took in Belize, and described each bird’s role in the ecosystem. All of this information is extremely relevant, and helped me to understand the intercooperivity of species in ecosystems, which is a major theme of APES.