By Pierce Rafferty, Director Henry L. Ferguson Museum Rob Bierregaard, Research Associate of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, returned to Fishers Island on April 29th at the invitation of the Henry L. Ferguson Museum. Rob’s goal was to “tag” a second male osprey on Fishers Island with a cell tower
Birds are quite literally both marvelous and wonderful. We marvel, with no small dose of envy, at their ability to fly, and we wonder, among many other things, what happens to so many of them in the winter. For millennia, the mysteries of migration—Where do birds go? How do they find their way to
Rob Bierregaard, a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, was invited by the Museum to come to Fishers Island on May 11, 2013, to “tag” an osprey with a transmitter.
Edwin H. Horning Edwin H. Horning, who passed away on August 28, 2008, first came to Fishers Island as a school teacher in 1951. He joined the Board of Trustees of the H.L. Ferguson Museum at its inception in 1960 and became the Museum's third curator
2012 Nature Notes Fishers Island is host to many bird species and perhaps the most striking are the herons and egrets, members of the bird family Ardeidae.
New York Report by James H. Hill, published in April 1901 (The Auk, New Series Vol. XVIII, No. 1, April 1901) Flat Hammock off North Hill once hosted a large tern colony. At the eastern end of Fishers Island, about two or three miles distant from the Connecticut shore is Wicopesset, a small,
From the Files of the Museum: Nesting Terns On and Around Fishers Island One Hundred Years Ago
Great Horned Owls on the Rafferty osprey nest and the Red-tailed hawk nest on Island Pond (Oyster Pond), spring 2011. Photos by Pierce Rafferty, John Wilton and Hank Golet.
2011 Nature Notes Two years ago, a bird not seen at Fishers Island for a number of years, returned. The bird was the Piping plover (Charadrius melodus), a federally threatened species in the Atlantic region. During the 1970s, the island supported a small colony of this species near Middle Farms; however, habitat change and other causes resulted in the disappearance of this bird from Fishers.
Great Gull Island has the largest nesting concentrations of Common Terns in the world (9,500 pairs) and the largest nesting concentration of endangered Roseate Terns in the western hemisphere (1,300 pairs). Some of these photos were taken during a Museum trip
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F.I. Sketchbook 2005
