December 2025 Meeting Minutes

Cayuga Bird Club Monthly Meeting, Monday, December 8, 2025 at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Auditorium 

7:20pm Reading of the List by Bob McGuire

7:30pm Call to Order and welcome by club president Tracy McLellan 

• No first-time attendees raised hands tonight

• October minutes approved by Stephanie Herrick, seconded by Jane Bain

• Tonight’s attendance: 47

• Cookies: Many thanks tonight to our president Tracy for tonight’s delicious hazelnut cookies and to her hazelnut trees that provided their nuttiness. We need a volunteer baker for May. The sign-up sheet is next to the cookies. 

• Next meeting Monday January 12th will be the ever popular SHARE YOUR PHOTOS night, led by Kevin McGowan. Participants may submit 5 photos. See CBC Website for details regarding submission and sharing. 

• Jared Dawson shared with us more about the Christmas Bird Count. He is leading it this year for his second time & has updated the CBC website in great detail, with maps denoting the 9 sections. Please read the update for full details. https://sites.google.com/site/cbc14850   The main concern is getting a volunteer to cover section 8. Laura Stenzler suggested that club members who counted that section in past years be contacted to see if they would be willing to take on leadership of that area. This year marks the National Audobon Society’s 125th year and CBC’s 64th consecutive year of involvement in the Christmas Bird Count. The count will be on New Year’s Day, Thursday Jan 1st, with our in person dish-to-pass dinner prior to the reading of the counts on Friday Jan 2rd.

• This will not be hybrid, but we will do a recording to post for people to watch later.

• There will be a dish-to-pass dinner starting at 6 with the reading going from 7:00 – 9:00pm  

• This will be in person at the Foundation of Light.  

Please bring serving utensils with your dish to share, a beverage and your own table service.

Field trips: 

The Loon Watch and Trip on the east side of the lake were reported in the most recent newsletter.

This past Saturday, there was another field trip. There will be a more complete report in the newsletter. We looked out at the lake from Stewart Park and then went to Jetty Woods, also known at Lighthouse Point, where there was a fair number of birds in the forest.

We had extensive discussion about this bird on Saturday. (Photo projected) Can anyone tell what bird this is? It remains a mystery! After friendly bird breed bantering, someone suggested we call it a Sharper’s Coopy! 

Ken and Diane will lead a half-day trip 12/13. We'll meet at 8:00 am at the east end of Stewart Park and carpool to visit other area hotspots where interesting birds have been reported recently. 

12/21 from 8-10am Suan Yong will lead a trip. Meet at Stewart Park, east parking lot.

Wear warm layers for the winter weather, including hats and gloves. Bring a spotting scope if you have one, a snack, and something to drink.

The trips are open to all. If you do not have binoculars and would like to borrow a pair for this field trip, let Diane or Suan know.

Weekly Thursday morning meetups are continuing in seasonally appropriate birding locations. This week we will look for field birds. 

Everyone is welcome to attend beginner bird walks at Sapsucker Woods every Saturday and Sunday, 9:30 this time of year.

The Conservation Action Committee is inactive this frozen season, but will meet after the New Year to plan next year’s activities. If you are interested in participating, contact Jody Enck (jodyenck@gmail.com)

You can still sign up to go on the club trip to the west side of the Andes in Ecuador and the Galapagos.  Once again, there’s never a guarantee of the birds you’ll see, but there’s a chance for small ground finch in the Galapagos.

There is one Birds of a Feather announcement: Hummingbird will be giving a presentation about the bird banding project at Lindsay Parsons Preserve that he has been conducting this year.  The presentation will be tomorrow night, 7:00 to the Danby Conservation Action Committee.  It will be held at the Danby Town Hall (1980 Danby Road) and all are welcome to attend.

7:47pm Caleb Centanni gave us a report on the evening grosbeak project, which the club provided funding for a year ago. Evening grosbeaks are irruptive here & are typically found in the Canadian boreal forest and western mountains. They are nicknamed grospigs at feeders. It’s hard to do surveys in remote areas so that is why radio tagging has been employed. Caleb showed a video he produced which included bow-nets with sunflower seeds as bait, and the process of radio tagging them with Motus backpacks and antennas.

8:05pm Tonight’s program: Grete Pasch-Valdés, PhD and now Graduate Student, MPS, Dept of Natural Resources, Cornell University. Her theme: Every Bird A Connection: Conservation Work in Guatemala.

Program ended at 8:54pm after Q&A.