The link that bird migration establishes between central New Jersey and Central America has inspired the Delaware & Raritan Greenway to cooperate with a sister land trust organization, Rainforest2Reef, in Calakmul, Mexico. Now, a documentary film is in the works to tell the stories of the birds that make the yearly journey between New Jersey’s deciduous forests and Mexico’s rain forests. Naturalist Bill Rawlyk, land preservation director for the D&R Greenway, and award winning filmmaker Gil Domb, whose work has appeared on the BBC, the Discovery Channel, and many other worldwide outlets, will tell us about both the conservation project and the film, Wings of Change. They plan to share some of the film footage with us as well.

This magical group of volcanic islands, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, is a protected place known for its rich endemic population of strange birds, giant tortoises, and plants and animals not found any place else on earth. Because most of the archipelago has been a National Park since 1959, the animals have little fear of humans, allowing photographic close-ups of blue-footed boobies, magnificent frigate birds, sea iguanas, penguins and the famed Galapagos tortoises. So join us for an evening’s cruise to a fabled hotspot of diversity.

Karen Linder gives her mother a nature calendar for Christmas every year. Mom gets to pick a picture from the calendar, and her Christmas present is an all-expenses paid vacation (with Karen) to that location. These trips provide needed time off from Karen’s hectic full time job as a pharmaceutical chemist and her other "full time" jobs as trustee in the Kingston Greenways Association and president and co-founder of Friends of Princeton Nursery Lands, two active open space organizations based in Kingston, N.J.

Rachel Mackow's ongoing photographic project, The Sourland Mountains, is a portrait of the environment in which she lives and works. Her focus is the life cycles of the landscape. The Sourlands series has been exhibited at St. Peter's Church in midtown-Manhattan's CitiGroup Center, Princeton Public Library, and the Johnson Education Center at the D&R Greenway Land Trust.

Rachel Mackow is a photographer whose work traces the life in rural and urban landscapes. She works with a variety of traditional photographic processes: silver gelatin prints, photograms, and hand-tinting with dyes. Her photography has been extensively exhibited with shows at the National Library in Havana, the Queens Museum, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her hand-tinted photographs were published in Harper's Magazine.

In addition to her artistic work, Rachel is a trustee of the Sourland Planning Council, educator, and gardener. For more information on the Sourlands, click on this link: www.sourlands.org.

Learn about the natural history of black bears in the Garden State, as well as the results of past and current bear research. This program also provides practical information on coexisting with black bears. Along with an audio-visual presentation, Michelle will share some show and tell items and informative publications, and respond to your questions.

In her capacity as Assistant Wildlife Biologist with the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, Michelle Ruggiero has worked with the NJ DEP Watershed Ambassador Program doing freshwater assessments in the Upper Delaware Watershed. Tonight’s program is part of her work with the Division of Fish and Wildlife’s Black Bear Education Project.

You may know the differences between the “bird books” by David Sibley, National Geographic, and Roger Tory Peterson, but what came before those field guides? Did our birding predecessors really take Jean James Audubon’s “Elephant Folio” (the modern edition weighs around 20 pounds!) into the field with them? John Yrizzary will tell us the story of how bird identification books evolved.

Professor Alan Mann of Princeton University returns to WCAS to tell us more about our own development as a species. This time, he will focus on what we can learn about our prehistoric ancestors from the art they left behind. Join us for a fascinating glimpse into the minds of humans tens of thousands of years ago.

Alan Mann is a physical anthropologist whose interests include paleoanthropology and human evolution.