Alan Devoe Bird Club

The Warbler
Club Newsletter
Last updated 3/20/06

Sample Articles:

Waterfowl Count—a Winter Pilgrimage by Kate Dunham
From The Warbler, Volume 48, Number 2, February 2006

Hudson River at Nutten Hook, photo by Willard Ulmer

Bird-Notes from Kamefield Farm by Natalie Curtis
Originally published in The Warbler, Volume 1, Number 4, October 1957
Re-published in The Warbler, Volume 46, Number 9, October 2004

Our Newsletter, The Warbler, has been the backbone of the Alan Devoe Bird Club. This is where Club members and friends have shared their love of nature and birds, rallied members and community for specific goals, and chronicled our many achievements. The two articles included on this page are samples that span the beginning to the present.

My mother joined and enrolled me as a member of ADBC in 1958. I was a 12 year old "farm kid" and was privileged to know many of our founders including our neighboring farmer Natalie Curtis. Nat spent time teaching me to observe life around her Kamefield Farm as I often followed her through her daily chores. I regret that I did not meet Alan Devoe, but since her farm adjoined his, I became familiar with the stream, meadow, and woods that he included in his stories. As I read his writings I can see where he sits or walks.

Another friend and "farm kid" is Kate Dunham, author of the included Waterfowl article. Kate is from the Midwest and we met through ADBC when she moved to Columbia County in the early 1970's. Her contributions to The Warbler and ADBC have been numerous, and we have spent many years birding together around the northeast.

It is a great honor to be the current editor of this almost 50-year-old publication. Technology of computers and improved printing process have changed and refined the appearance of The Warbler. We now have photos to enhance the articles, but the philosophy and observations of writers has not changed.

On page 28 of his 1951 book, The Fascinating Animal World, naturalist Alan Devoe says

The word animalizer is not in the dictionary. It comes from an old farmer neighbor of mine, over across the hill from the hundred-and-some acres of woods and fields that surround my house and that constitute, so to speak, the living laboratory in which daily around the year I do my animal-examining. I encountered this old neighbor one day some years ago, when I was following a deer track or trying to locate where the crows were roosting or some such thing and he halted me to ask some question or other about the outdoors. "I thought perhaps you'd know," he said, "you being such an animalizer." "Animalizer." Could anything better describe those of us who go poking into chipmunk burrows and snooping into birds' nests and probing around under old stumps, wanting to find out all we possibly can about our fellow animals and their world?

Let us enter into the next fifty years as "animalizers," to continue this tradition, and to add our observations of the natural world to The Warbler.

— Nancy Kern

For more information about the newsletter and its history, see our History page.