Thursday, November 16th at 7:00pm at the Killingworth Firehouse. The Killingworth Library and Killingworth Land Trust will host naturalist, photographer and writer William Burt at the Killingworth Firehouse. The program is free but advance sign up is required. Burt will offer a lecture on “Water Babies.” The “babies” are the downy young of ducks, grebes, gallinules and shorebirds, herons, and the other birds of wetlands – those that get their feet wet, as it were – and challenging they are, to birder and photographer alike: quick-footed, wary, and well-camouflaged, to say the least; and temporary (you have only a week or two each year in which to find them). But above all else, they are endearing. From the comic-monster herons to the fuzzy ducklings and stick-legged sandpipers, these tots have personality, and spunk. You see it in their faces, every one. You’ll see the parent birds in this slide presentation, too. Each downy chick is juxtaposed with the adult it will become.
To photograph these youngsters and adults, William Burt prowled through their wetland breeding grounds each spring and summer for some 7 years, all over North America, from the arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico. The result: a portrait of these wild birds of the wetlands as both young and old, unknown and known, new and familiar.
William Burt is a naturalist, photographer and writer with a passion for wild places – especially marshes – and the elusive birds few people see. His photographs and stories are seen in Smithsonian, Audubon, National Wildlife and other magazines, and he is the author of four books: Shadowbirds (1994); Rare & Elusive Birds of North America (2001); Marshes: The Disappearing Edens (2007); and the new Water Babies (2015). He lectures often, and his traveling exhibitions have shown at some 35 museums across the U.S. and Canada – including The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, The New Brunswick Museum, The Calgary Science Center, The Liberty Science Center, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In 1989, for an exhibition of Burt’s photography of marsh birds, Roger Tory Peterson wrote the following: “William Burt is a perfectionist whose photographs of rails and other shy and elusive birds of the wetlands are unquestionably the finest ever taken. I admire his technical skill and perseverance (14 years) in getting these pictures. He has set a new standard.”