Posted by Bob Lefebvre

Birds & Beers will kick off the fall season with a meeting this Thursday, August 22.

Royal Canadian Legion, Centennial Calgary Branch#285,

9202 Horton Road SW.

Thursday August 22, 2019, 6:00-9:00 pm

Birds & Beers is a casual social get-together that is free and open to everyone. Children may attend if accompanied by an adult. Food and drinks are available at reasonable prices.

We will meet in the large auditorium which is to the right after you enter the Legion. After 7 pm, there will be a special presentation by Gus Yaki on colour abnormalities in birds.

Gus will show photos from the Calgary region of many birds with unusual markings. Most birders are aware of terms like albinism, leucism, and melanism, but there are actually six types of colour abnormalities, and many of these terms are often poorly understood and improperly used.

If you can’t arrive by 6 pm come anytime after that. The presentation will begin by about 7:15. You can also come early if you want – long-time attendees have learned that this is a good way to avoid the lineups at the grill.

We have booked the dates for upcoming Birds & Beers as follows, so mark these dates in your calendars. (Note the unusual Wednesday date in November.)

Thursday October 3

Thursday October 31

Wednesday November 27

All of these will be in the same location, in the big auditorium at the Horton Road Legion. We plan to have presentations but these aren’t finalized yet.

Here is an update on the projector used for presentations. When we started Birds & Beers it was purely a social event, and we had no plans to do presentations. However, Gus suggested we add short talks after the social part of the evening, and after doing this a few times if soon became clear that people really enjoyed this part of the evening. At first we borrowed the Legion’s projector, but this was not always available. Then we borrowed Nature Calgary’s, but they no longer have one as they don’t need it in their new location. So we have been borrowing one from one of our regular attendees, but we felt that if we are going to continue to have presentations we should have our own system.

We brought this topic up at the May Birds & Beers, and people were very enthusiastic, and donated generously towards purchasing our own projector. We collected more money at the June meeting, and we now have $528. This is just about enough to cover the cost of the system we are looking at. We may need about $90 more to purchase a replacement bulb, so we may ask for one more round of (optional!) donations. Then we should have our projector ready for the meeting on October 3.

A big thanks to Joan and Wayne Walker for spearheading the projector search (and for booking the Legion, and for doing almost everything relating to Birds & Beers!), to Dave Russum for lending us his projector for several meetings, and to Dan Arndt for providing his technical expertise in the projector search.

See you on Thursday!

Birds & Beers Facebook page.