October 2025 Meeting Minutes

Cayuga Bird Club Monthly Meeting
Monday, October 13, 2025
Cornell Lab of Ornithology Auditorium

Reading of the List 

by Ken Haas

Call to Order 

by club president Stephanie Herrick

• 3 New attendees stood & introduced themselves

• September minutes approved by Marie Read, seconded by Jill Leichter

• Tonight’s Attendance: 59

Cookies

Many thanks tonight to current Director, past president, club field trip leader and 35+year club member Gladys Birdsall, for tonight’s delicious cookies!

The blank cookie sign-up sheet on the table ended up being filled with volunteer cookie bakers for the next several months. 

Next Meeting 

November 10th, here at the Cornell Lab VC where we will learn from wildlife biologist, conservationist and writer Wenfei Tong who will be presenting “Bird Love: Why identify WITH birds?”

Membership Renewals!

Final Reminder - Today, 10/13/25 is the last day to renew your CBC membership and get a coupon code for a free Bird academy course good until the beginning of December thanks to the Cornell Lab.

Membership chair Diane Morton is here tonight and can collect your dues, or you can zip off to the club website after tonight’s meeting and sign up via Paypal.

Financial Report

• Club treasurer Ken Kemphues presented the post-NYSOA financial report: 

• We have over $59K in cash assets. 

• With $30K in commitments, that leaves $29K for projects & donations. 

• Hosting NYSOA earned CBC $5,076

Upcoming CBC Events

Left recent field trips for the November newsletter since we have a pretty full agenda tonight. 

This October we can expect a similar variety of birding opportunities as we had last month, ranging from recurring to scheduled bird outing events that folks can look forward to:

•     Our Thursday morning Birding Meetups, continue to be well-attended

•     The Wednesday bird banding will be shifting to weekends for the rest of the month; Suan is currently working to confirm the dates

•     We will keep our weekend BBW’s to start at 8:30 for the rest of October,  then switch to 9:30am in November

•     Suan will lead a weekend field trip to Stewart park at the end of the month.

Looking ahead to early November, we will have our annual event to look for migrating loons that head south for the winter, taking off from the north end of Cayuga Lake and Lake Ontario. Migration is a weather-dependent event; on “good” north-wind days you might see hundreds of loons migrating over Cayuga Lake. But the north wind also means cold, and standing in the wind coming all the way down lake can be very cold. So please dress properly for the weather so you can enjoy the watch. Remember, there is no bad weather, just unsuitable clothing, so please wear layers and cold-weather boots, warm gloves and hats. Also bring warm liquids. We will meet at the northernmost parking lot of the State Park south of Taughannock creek, which if you are coming from the Ithaca area, is the first right turn into the park.The precise times are part of a protocol that counts the loons in 15-minute periods beginning 15 minutes before sunrise. Also note that clocks will be set back one hour.

Conservation Action Committee

Two pieces of news this month from the Conservation Action Committee:

1) The Cayuga Bird Club, in collaboration with Holbrook Travel, is going on a birding trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos: July 2026.

2) We still have native plants to put in the ground down at Lighthouse Point, so if anyone wants to help out with that, please contact Jody Enck.

3) The Cayuga Bird Club, in collaboration with Holbrook Travel (https://www.holbrooktravel.com/), is going on a birding trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos: July 2026.
    Also, a trip to Panama is planned for January 6-16, 2027.

Youth Birding

As with the rest of the club, our Youth Birders are ready for their 2025 program. Youth ages 9+ (or occasionally younger, with attending guardian/parent) are welcome to join us for birding, career exploration, conservation projects, birdy games and activities, and more! The group generally meets at 9:00 am at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County building on Willow Ave to start each session for trips to various bird hot spots, but that may vary depending on location for each monthly program.  Youth should bring clothes for the weather, a filled water bottle and field guides/binoculars if they want to.  Club leaders will also have binoculars for everyone to borrow if needed.  Check out our club’s Youth page for details.

Motus

Our two Motus towers continue to pick up birds-on-the-move.  Diane Morton shared the story of our Myers Point Motus station detecting a radio-tagged Least Bittern this September. The bird had been tagged in Montreal the previous spring and departed Montreal on September 11. After flying by stations at Seneca Meadows and Myers Point on September 12, this Least Bittern flew past stations in Virginia and South Carolina, reaching southeastern Georgia on September 15.  

Birds of a Feather

Continuing our recent practice of sharing birding-related and birding-adjacent interests, I have an event to share tonight.  Please make a note that on Monday, Oct 20th, our own Ken Haas will be presenting “Behind the Shot” stories of some of his favorite photos at the Driftwood Inn on Wyers Point Rd in Ovid. I know we have plenty of people who are interested in bird photography, so this might be something for you to pencil in! 

Annual Report

Before we move on to the Officer Elections, I’d like to reflect on another successful year for the CBC.  This year I have decided to no longer call this the “President’s Annual Report”. Sure, the president delivers it, but it really is a summary of the last 12 months of the club’s accomplishments across all dimensions of our organization, starting with our membership. We continue to have a strong membership and are once again able to offer a free Bird Academy course as part of our ongoing partnership with the Cornell Lab. Our members and guests get to enjoy the Monthly Meetings which returned to the Lab Visitor Center Auditorium in November 2024 where we have continued to have a variety of presentations including our first ever book signing, plus we introduced

“Birds of a Feather” for sharing birding-related items of club member interest.

In addition to regular business meetings, we have also enjoyed participating in our annual events:

•        the Christmas Bird Count & Celebration dinner at Foundation of Light

•        the Annual Share Your Photos night which was finally In person again, and

•        our Annual picnic at Myers Park.

And if you cannot attend every meeting, our lovely monthly newsletter keeps our far-flung flock together.

Field trips have grown over the past year in terms of variety of offerings,

as we spread our wings to explore events throughout the week in different venues,

In addition to the traditional weekend field trips, our Youth program continues to offer their own monthly trips and activities to the next generation of local birders.

The perennially-popular Spring Ornithology with Steve Kress (SOSK) was once again offered, providing a well-loved educational opportunity to dozens of attendees. 

While the Conservation Action Committee once again rolled out several initiatives over the course of the year, not only in service of protecting birds and other wildlife and their environment, but of our club and the broader bird and birder community. We supported several projects in the past 12 months that members felt were congruent with our club’s purpose, the last 2 of which we, as club members, have had the opportunity to experience the benefits directly!

And then finally, there was a whole range of additional miscellaneous club accomplishments:

•        we now have beautiful new club brochures like the one you see here

•        we also have a policy for creating a diverse and inclusive club environment and extended that into a field trips guidelines document

•       we went through several monthly “survey says” newsletter articles to fully address all club survey feedback

•        we’ve got a new CBC Instagram account as well as a more active story-telling approach for our club Facebook page

•        and there are cool CBC hats and shirts available at Wild Birds Unlimited. 

Now, before you tell me I missed something, because maybe I did, I decided this deserved a space of its own. Because when you think about all we accomplished together in the past 12 months, considering that we did all that while we still pulled off hosting a very successful NYSOA 2025 conference, well, I think this whole club deserves a round of applause!

Officer Elections

Tonight we vote for our proposed candidates to lead the club into the next year. A reminder - only current members (who have already paid your dues) are eligible to vote for the club officers. As we have done in past years, the vote is done by Voice Vote; there were no alternate nominations, so we have only one person per office tonight, and the vote will be on the full slate all at once. 

To lead the vote, I call on outgoing Club Director, Suan Yong. Suan read the list of candidates & the slate of officers were voted in unanimously. 

New President Goals

New President Tracey McClellen was introduced and shared her goals for CBC: 

Continue to build on strengths: membership, activities, participation, finances.

I have the impression that I am coming into a strong organization. We have a lot of members, we are in good financial shape, and we have lots of good things going on.  I want to support all of those things.

Continue to seek input from members.

The members were asked for input into the club’s activities and we learned some things from that.  There is a mechanism for providing input, and I want to continue to have members feel comfortable giving feedback and new ideas.  The Thursday morning walks came out of that initiative, and we kept birding during the entire summer. 

Involve more members in running the club.

There is a small group of very active members who carry a huge amount of responsibility for club activities.  It would be nice to have more members participate in running the club - some elected officers and committee chairs have been in their positions for years and some wear a lot of hats.  It’s a great way to get to know people better and to have input into the club. 

Presentation 

The Birds and People of Cuba – a land so near and yet so far. Presented by former club presidents Jody Enck, Stephanie Herrick & Kevin McGowan. This was followed by a Q&A that included 5 other participants from the CBC/Holbrook Cuba trip of April 2025.