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The 2019 Spring meeting of the MBC was held Saturday, April 13th at the Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester. 44 members attended on a warm spring evening.
It's always a good time to catch up with friends at the start of a new butterfly season. The pot luck buffet was excellent as usual. The salads, appetizers, entrees and desserts were delicious and provided many options for all.
Thanks to Nancy Callahan for setting up the tables and chairs and to Wendy Howes for her recycling and clean-up efforts.
We had a brief business meeting. Barbara Volkle spoke about the Massachusetts tax form check box (33a) to contribute to the Endangered Wildlife Conservation. Keep it in mind when you file next year. Danielle Desmarais spoke about the Hessel's Hairstreak project. The business meeting was followed by a brief auction of several butterfly books, including a hardbound copy of Butterflies of the East Coast (now selling for a good premium on Amazon as it is out of print).
Noted butterfly author and photographer (and club member) Rick Cech was our featured speaker. The subject was Butterfly Taxonomy in the New World – A New World for Observers. It has taken some decades for the promise of DNA-based analysis to reach maturity. Recently, the family relationships of butterflies have been much clarified, an effort drawing on the work of multiple international contributors. For observers, the rewards of this effort can be personal as well as intellectual – helping finally sort out some long-confusing tangles among butterfly groups, especially in the Neotropics.
An active field naturalist, author, and photographer, Rick Cech is an affiliate curator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Entomology. He is the principal author and photographer of Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer’s Guide (Princeton, 2005), and wrote A Distributional Checklist of the Butterflies and Skippers of the New York City Area.
This was followed by our members butterfly photo presentation. Photos were presented by Bill Benner, Howard Hoople, Linda Graetz, Steve Moore, Dave Small, Garry Kessler and Soheil Zendah. Dave Small helped facilitate the presentations. We do appreciate his technical know-how.
Many thanks to all who volunteered and attended.
Below are some photographs taken at the meeting by a reluctant photogapher.
Mouse over photo to see captions. Click on photo to see larger image.
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