SOFO’s Young Birders Club: For ages 8 to 18
Club Leader: Frank Quevedo, SOFO Executive Director
Birding is a great way to make new friends, learn about the environment, and get outdoors. Join our Young Birders Club! The Club meets at 10AM on the third Sunday of every month and is open to anyone ages 8 to 18 who is interested in learning about birds. Since Long Island has many great habitats that are home to a wide variety of species, we concentrate on birding in local areas. The Club’s leader is Frank Quevedo, SOFO Executive Director and an excellent and avid birder. The Club advisor is Barbara Blaisdell, an educator and experienced birder. Please bring binoculars if you have them (we will have a few pairs to lend) and a field guide to birds of the eastern United States. If you don’t have a field guide, we’ll have one for you to use. This is a free program.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this program, which has limited enrollment please contact us at info@sofo.org or call 631-537-9735. Spots will be reserved on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Secret Life of Vineyard Pond: This program is for all ages.
Program Leader: Jake Kushner, SOFO Environmental Educator, Reptile and Amphibian Specialist
In this hands-on program, you’ll discover the tiny secrets that inhabit a pond and help our friends (the turtles, frogs, ducks, and fish) to not just survive but thrive. We will use magnifiers and microscopes to view the secrets that are too small for our unaided eye to see. We’ll discover the strange ways pond secrets breathe, catch their food, and hide from danger as we look for dragonfly young, bubble-carrying beetles, tadpoles, and other pond life! Please dress to get wet or muddy!
There is a $15 fee for Adults and $10 fee for children for this program. Members are free.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this program, please contact info@sofo.org
An Exploration of Water Quality: This program is for adults, teens, and children ages 8 and older.
Program Leader: LeighAnn Montaglione, SOFO Environmental Educator
Water is an important part of our ecosystems on the South Fork of Long Island. Over the years the water quality in these ecosystems has declined. Join LeighAnn as we hike together to different bodies of water and learn about water quality, and how we can make a positive change in the quality of our water.
There is a $15 fee for Adults and $10 fee for children for this program. Members are free.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this program, which has limited enrollment please contact us at info@sofo.org or call 631-537-9735.
Birding with Frank—Shorebirds at Shinnecock: Adults/Children 8+
Walk Leader: Frank Quevedo, Executive Director, South Fork Natural History Museum
Summer is the best time to view some of the fifty or more species of shorebirds that comb the beaches, sand flats, and marshes of Long Island. On this walk, we will visit Shinnecock Bay in Southampton and focus on plovers, yellowlegs, oystercatchers, and sandpipers as they feed by wading in shallow waters.
There is a $15 fee for Adults and $10 fee for children for this program. Members are free.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this walk, please contact us at info@sofo.org. Spots will be reserved on a first-come, first-served basis, and we will confirm your reservation by email.
SOFO’s Young Environmentalists Society (YES!) presents:
A Conversation with Doctor Carl Safina about his writings, “Beyond Words: What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel”, “Beyond Words: What Wolves and Dogs Think and Feel” and “Nina Delmar: The Great Whale Rescue”.
YES! members will be presenting questions to Dr. Safina based directly on these publications. This will be an informative and thoughtful program for the entire family.
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing about the human relationship with the living world has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation fellowships; book awards from the National Academies, the Lannan Foundation, and Orion Magazine; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights outside and on the water as he could. Safina’s studies of seabirds earned him a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University. He is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and the founder of the not-for-profit Safina Center. His writing appears in the New York Times, Time, Audubon, National Geographic, on the Web at CNN.com, Yale e360, and elsewhere, and his PBS series Saving the Ocean can be viewed online. Two of his books have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, including his 2020 book Becoming Wild; How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.
Carl lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife, Patricia, and their dogs and feathered friends.
This is a free event.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this program, which has limited enrollment please contact us at info@sofo.org or call 631-537-9735.
Long Island Wildlife through Skulls, Pelts and Skins: This program is for all ages.
Program Leader: Educator from the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge
An educator from the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge in Shirley will help you to identify a variety of Long Island reptiles, birds, and mammals based on observations of their teeth, skull size and shape, and fur or skin. The refuge is one of seven National Wildlife Refuges on Long Island. At 2,550 acres, this refuge is one of the biggest on the Island.
Bisected by the Carmans River, it hosts a variety of habitats that attract and support many types of wildlife. It is also headquarters for the Long Island National Refuge Complex and houses an excellent visitor’s center. East End Beacon
Photo credit – East End Beacon
There is a $15 fee for Adults and $10 fee for children for this program. Members are free.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this program, please contact info@sofo.org
Hike Leader: Melanie Meade of South Fork Natural History Museum (SOFO)
Experience Summer at Mashomack Preserve. Shelter Island’s Mashomack Preserve is one of the biggest and most spectacular nature preserves on Long Island. Its 2,039 acres protect a huge variety of habitats and countless species of native plants and animals. Join SOFO on this hike through the heart of the preserve, and learn what you can find in this “Jewel of the Peconic.”
There is a $10 fee for Adults and $7 fee for children for this program. Members are free.
Advanced reservations are required for all events. To register for this program, which has limited enrollment. Please contact us at info@sofo.org or call 631-537-9735. Spots will be reserved on a first-come, first-served basis.
Images of Our Universe─The James Webb Space Telescope, with the Hamptons Observatory: This program is for adults, teens, and children ages 8 and older. This is a free program.
Program Leader: William Francis Taylor, Hamptons Observatory Senior Educator
Photo credit – nasa.gov
Webb is the largest and most complex space science telescope ever built – the premier observatory of the next decade. This international mission, led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies, successfully launched on December 25, 2021. Webb was designed to provide a new view of the cosmos and push the field of astronomy into a new era. The telescope will observe the universe in the infrared, peering inside dust clouds to study light from distant parts of the universe for the very first time – the first galaxies that formed about 13.5 billion years ago – and give us insight into how our universe formed. It will also explore distant worlds in other solar systems, as well as objects in our own solar system. Webb will extend the scientific discoveries of other NASA missions like the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. People of all ages and backgrounds will find inspiration in the Webb mission, which will fundamentally change our understanding of the universe for this generation and many to come. In this free, virtual lecture, Hamptons Observatory Senior Educator, William Francis Taylor, will show and describe the amazing images taken by the JWST. William has been a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador since 2014, lecturing about the universe around us and sharing his love of the heavens by giving guided tours of the sky through telescopes. He is a life-long East End resident.
Registration Link: https://Webb-Talk.eventbrite.com