The next meeting of the Prince George's Audubon Society and the Patuxent Bird Club (MOS chapter) will be held tomorrow night, 7:30 p.m. at the College Park Airport Annex.  Directions and more information available on our website, http://www.pgaudubon.org .  The program is free and open to the public.

Doug Forsell, from the Chesapeake Bay Field Office of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, will discuss the status and trends of wintering waterfowl of the Chesapeake Bay; other wintering waterbirds and their habitats in open waters of the Bay such as seaducks, loons, and gannets; the results of recent offshore coastal surveys from New Jersey to North Carolina; and the threats faced by offshore birds, including sand mining, bycatch in gillnets, and wind power development.

Doug has studied migratory birds for over 35 years, 33 of those with USFWS.  He spent ten years in Alaska primarily studying the at-sea distribution and abundance of marine birds and four years as the refuge manager of five remote tropical Pacific islands where he censused and studied breeding biology of 12 species of tropical seabirds and monitored wintering green sea turtles.  Since 1990, he has worked to implement the Waterfowl Management Plan of the Chesapeake Bay Program by interpreting waterfowl population trends, surveying waterbirds in offshore waters, assessing the mortality of waterbirds in anchored gillnets, modeling diving duck distributions, and identifying and mitigating threats to birds and their habitats.  Most recently, he has completed several years of aerial winter waterbird surveys from New Jersey through Virginia to determine the distribution of waterbirds to 14 miles offshore and is using the data to influence sand mining and wind
 power development.