VERO BEACH — Black-capped Petrel, Razorbill, Red-billed Tropicbird, Bulwer’s Petrel, Manx Shearwater, Band rumped Storm-Petrel: these are names that set a birder’s heart racing in Florida.
The pelagic birds are one of the last frontiers of our understanding of Florida’s avifauna. These birds of the open ocean come from distant shores of the Arctic, remote islands of the Caribbean and South America, or from the coast of Europe, northwest Africa, and even islands off Antarctica.
These great travelers pass by our shores largely unseen. The difficulties of offshore access limit the numbers of observers, and this is compounded by the challenges of identification. Our knowledge is often limited to coastal observers getting a brief glimpse of a shearwater or storm-petrel.
Systematic studies of Florida’s oceanic birdlife are very few. This program will offer an introduction to this challenging group of birds as we continue to try to unravel the dynamics of the occurrence of these birds off of our coast and their relationship to the oceanic environments.
Mr. Brothers is currently the Director of the Marine Science Center in Ponce Inlet, FL, where he has worked since 2004. He has over 35 years of experience in museum administration in city, county, state, and private non-profit museums.
Mr. Brothers is the former Executive Director of the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach. He served as Executive Director of the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the Curator of Education and Statewide Services for the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee, as well as 10 years as the Curator of Science at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach.
Mr. Brothers has a Master’s Degree in Natural Resource Management and also served for nine years as visiting associate professor at Florida State University.
Mr. Brothers has extensive natural resource and natural science interpretive experience including specializations in the bird life and flora of Central Florida, as well as leading natural history tours throughout Florida, the Okefenokee Swamp, the Galapagos Islands, Kenya, Machu Picchu, and the Amazon.
He has been leading pelagic birding trips off of Florida’s east coast for the last 9 years. These trips extend to the Gulf Stream and even out 100 miles to the 3,000 foot deep canyons beyond the Gulf Stream.
Mr. Brothers is currently working on The Birds of Volusia County, a summary of the avifauna of this area. His research specialty is in the coastal and oceanic birds of Florida.
He is currently a member of the Florida Ornithological Society Records Committee, which evaluates reports of birds recorded in the wild in Florida and is responsible for updating the scientific record of Florida’s avifauna.
Mr. Brothers and his wife Kathryn live in Ormond Beach. Their son Jordan, 23, just graduated from the University of Florida, and their daughter McKenzie, 19, is a freshman at Florida State University.
Pelagic Birds of Northeast Florida will be the topic of April 15 Pelican Island Audubon meeting at the Vero Beach Community Center, 2266 14th Ave., starting at 7:30 p.m.
The public is invited to attend.