Keynote Presentation

Osprey as Environmental Sentinels

Erick Greene is Professor Emeritus in the Division of Biological Sciences and in the Wildlife Biology Program at The University of Montana.  He grew up in Quebec, Canada, with twin passions for music and nature.  Erick dropped out of high school and lived for a year in the Galapagos Islands, working as a researcher on Darwin’s Finches.  He then worked on seabirds 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle with the Canadian Wildlife Service.  He returned for undergraduate studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he studied biology, music and mathematics, and then received a PhD from Princeton University.  He was the Director of UM’s Bird Ecology Lab, and has broad interests in ecology, evolution and conservation.

About Dr. Greene’s presentation

Ospreys are unique fishing raptors, and we are lucky they are so abundant along the rivers and lakes in Montana. Since they are at the top of aquatic food chains, they can tell us a lot about the health of our rivers and streams. For the past two decades, Rob Domenech and his research crew at Raptor View Research Institute has been coordinating studies of Ospreys in western Montana. In this talk, we will give an overview of the biology of this fascinating bird, and tell you about the  long-term studies on heavy metals in Ospreys, and what that tells us about the clean-up of the Upper Clark Fork River – largest EPA Superfund site in the US.

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