SEQUIM — When the Dungeness River Audubon Center opened in 2001, Bob Boekelheide began its first citizen-science program: Wednesday morning bird walks at Railroad Bridge Park.
Twenty years and more than 1,100 bird walks later, the data provides one of the longest-running series of weekly bird surveys in the Pacific Northwest.
Boekelheide will show how the walks have documented the waxing and waning and resilience of a variety of bird populations on the North Olympic Peninsula, from Anna’s hummingbirds to bald eagles, at the next Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society meeting set for 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Dungeness River Nature Center, 2151 W. Hendrickson Road.
The meeting, featuring Boekelheide’s “Birds of Railroad Bridge Park: 20 Years of Weekly Bird Walks on the Olympic Discovery Trail,” is free and open to the public.
Boekelheide, who earned a master’s degree in ecology from the University of California-Davis, has a lifelong interest in the ecology of marine vertebrates — particularly birds and mammals.
He participated in several marine research projects to the Arctic, Antarctic, Washington state and California, including seven years as biologist at the Farallon Islands off the coast of California.
While in California, he co-authored the book “Seabirds of the Farallon Islands” and several papers about the marine ecology of nesting seabirds and marine mammals.
A certificated teacher, he taught science and math in Wapato, Sequim and Port Angeles public schools.
Boekelheide is the former director of the Dungeness River Nature Center. As bird count chair for the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society, he has compiled the annual Sequim-Dungeness Christmas Bird Count and the Clallam County Spring Migration Count for more than 26 years, as well as helping to organize several other citizen-science projects on the Peninsula — including the weekly Wednesday morning bird walks in Railroad Bridge Park.
Though the countywide masking mandate will have been lifted, masks are encouraged, meeting organizers said.
