A young man’s flight to the world of birds and birding

KENT — Marvelwood School alum Sean Graesser shared stories and pictures from his work with the Roger Tory Peterson Institute as well as the National Audubon Society at Town Hall on Thursday, Oct. 16. 

The event was sponsored by the Kent Land Trust and featured tales from Graesser’s time in South America, where he has studied sensitive habitats of neotropical migrants birds, as well as amphibians, butterflies and natural pollenators. 

In his talk, Graesser explained how he ended up discovering his passion as well as some of the things he’s done since graduating from Marvelwood. 

He also showed pictures of animals he has captured and “banded” over the course of his time working in nature. Several of the pictures were of bird wings and showed the process of moulting — the periodic replacement of a bird’s feathers by shedding older ones and producing new ones in their place. 

Feathers are dead structures when the bird reaches full maturity, he explained, and are gradually abraded and need to be replaced. 

Adult birds moult at least once a year, although many moult twice and some as many as three times each year. The number of feathers and area on the body also varies. 

Graesser also talked briefly about how he learned how to identify specific species as well as gender of the birds, a process that included a massive amount of notes on each bird he observed in the wild. 

When he returned to the U.S., Graesser compare those notes to books and field guides in libraries to determine the identity of the animals he had observed. 

It was at the Marvelwood School that Graesser discovered his love for nature. As a kid, he was always interested in animals and the outdoors. As he grew older, he began to focus on other things such as sports. 

One autumn, while playing soccer, Graesser hurt his ankle and needed to be taken to the hospital. The person who took him was Marvelwood science teacher Laurie Doss, who has done groundbreaking research on birds. Among other projects, she works with students on banding birds that fly through Kent, as a way to track their migration; and she leads annual trips with students and, sometimes, with Audubon, to Panama to study birds. 

On that trip to the hospital, student and teacher began talking about Doss’ work. Graesser’s  interest was ignited. He  accompanied Doss on one of the trips to Panama to help study and band neotropical migrant birds. On the first morning there, as he walked outside, Graesser was overcome by all the birds he could see and hear and realized this was what he wanted to do with his life. He has been a licensed master bird bander for roughly eight years since.

In 2011, Graesser partnered with friend and fellow nature enthusiast Tyler Christensen to collect funding to allow them to open the Nicoya Penninsula Avian Research Station. The preserve has four separate bird banding stations in the northwest portion of Costa Rica, which  includes Monte Verde and the Cloud Forest. 

Christensen and Graesser study neotropical migrants, there, on their wintering grounds,  and they study the biology of the resident birds that inhabit what is an important coastal ecosystem. 

Their project works in collaboration with the Institute for Bird Populations on winter birdbanding projects. 

The two also study hummingbirds at a third site, a private preserve called Finca Pura Vida.

Graesser  previously  worked with Connecticut Audubon, where he studied federally threatened bird species that nest on local beaches. He also conducted habitat and conservation management assessments. 

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