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We both take great pleasure in being able to nominate Clive Goodwin for the 2014 OFO Distinguished Ornithologist Award. Clive has been a leader in Ontario field ornithology and conservation for nearly our entire lifetime and his selection as a recipient of this award is certainly well deserved.

Clive was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, where his earliest recollection of watching birds dates back to the age of five. By his teenage years, he had already started a birdwatching society at Castleford Grammar School in the village of Garforth, for which he received the Rotary service prize for outstanding public service upon his graduation.

After a two year conscription period in the Royal Air Force, he emigrated with his family to Toronto in 1949. He worked from 1949 to 1965 at the Canadian General Electric Company, working his way up to Production Control Manager at its electronics factory. He also completed his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto in 1962.

Clive’s involvement in leadership roles within the Ontario natural history community was swift and it certainly blossomed into a lifelong commitment. From 1965 until 1977, he was fortunate to find a job more in keeping with his personal interests when he was appointed Executive Director of the Conservation Council of Ontario, the umbrella organization of the province’s conservation groups. His work there included the preparation and presentation of briefs to various levels of government on a wide variety of resource issues, the organization of conferences and seminars, and the editing of all council proceedings. Topics he became involved with were as diverse as wildlife management, conservation education, soil erosion, extinction, air pollution, water pollution, roads issues, and issues involving solid waste and recycling. He also edited their quarterly publication, The Bulletin.

Clive has amassed quite a prodigious output of volunteer activities on behalf of a myriad of Ontario nature clubs: On behalf of the Toronto Field Biologist Club, he served as Associate Editor of their journal, the Ontario Field Biologist, from 1957 to 1959, and served as a member of their executive committee from 1957-1959 and 1961-1964. For the Toronto Ornithological Club, he served as Business Secretary from 1956-1958 and served on their executive council from 1978-1988. From 1968 to 1982, he took over the organization of the Lake Ontario Mid-Winter Waterfowl Inventory from Ott Devitt, and went on to expand that count to include the entire Canadian shoreline of Lake Ontario. This important data set now demonstrates trends in winter waterfowl numbers in the Greater Toronto Area for an unbroken series of 69 years and the entire Canadian shore of Lake Ontario for 25 years.

For the Federation of Ontario Naturalists (FON) (now Ontario Nature), Clive served as editor of The Young Naturalist from 1959-1961, edited their magazine The Ontario Naturalist (predecessor to Seasons, now ON Nature) from 1962-1965, and wrote their ‘Worth Noting’ bird column from 1962-1967 and 1975-1982. He served as an elective board member from 1962-1966 and as an executive committee member from 1964-1965. He led FON field trips to the Bruce Peninsula for many years as well as trips to England, France and Spain. It was through the FON that Clive met his wife Joy. He also contributed the Toronto section to their 1964 A Naturalist’s Guide to Ontario and the Northumberland County section to its 1997 follow-up A Nature Guide to Ontario. Between 1968 and 1972, he served the Toronto Field Naturalists, first as Chair of the Bird Studies Group, and later as Vice-President and President.

For a truly astounding 18 years (1965-1982), Clive served as the editor of the Ontario section of Audubon Field Notes (later American Birds, now North American Birds), the journal of record for notable field observations in North America. This involved producing a quarterly four-thousand word summary of noteworthy bird observations for the whole province from a network of up to 300 observers and several dozen sub-regional editors. Anyone who has ever edited a report for a single quarter will appreciate the enormity of this accomplishment. To this very day, he still serves as a subregional editor for Northumberland County. In 1970, frustrated by the often arbitrary nature of decisions forced upon his work in Audubon Field Notes (particularly in light of the recent passing of Jim Baillie, the Royal Ontario Museum’s Assistant Curator of Ornithology), Clive was instrumental in organizing the province’s first attempt at a system of peer review of rare bird sightings by overseeing the formation of the Ontario Ornithological Records Committee and acting as its Secretary until 1982. It was the precursor to the current Ontario Bird Records Committee, which was subsequently formed along with the establishment of the Ontario Field Ornithologists in 1982, and thus extends the era of peer review of rare birds in Ontario back to an impressive period of forty-five years.

Clive has been very active in organized field work in Ontario. From 1953 to 1960 he conducted winter bird population studies that were published annually in Audubon Field Notes. Likewise, from 1955 to 1969 he conducted breeding bird population surveys that were also published in Audubon Field Notes.

Between 1950 and 2005, he had a 56 year unbroken series of participation in the annual Christmas Bird Count on either the Toronto or Cobourg counts. Similarly, he has participated in nearly every one of the 68 annual Lake Ontario Mid-Winter Waterfowl Inventory counts each January. Between 1980 and 1985, he was on the management committee for the first Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas and was a very active atlasser in several regions. From 2001 to 2005, he was a member of the local Northumberland County organizing committee for the second Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas and was an active atlasser once again.

In 1977, Clive left his position as Executive Director of the Conservation Council of Ontario to take a position as the Executive Director of Toronto’s Civic Garden Centre managing a public enterprise with 27 staff and 160 volunteers and a membership of 2600 people.

By 1981, Clive and Joy made the decision to work independently as freelance naturalists. As Clive puts it: “Very quickly we decided to offer nature courses and do nature interpretation, including leading trips. My role proved to be providing the ‘nature’ part, while Joy provided support and handled the more ‘people’ parts of the enterprise.” They began to teach bird identification courses through the Civic Garden Centre, Humber and Seneca community colleges, the Brentwood, Deer Park and Orchard-view public libraries, as well as from their home. They also hosted waterfowl viewing days for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources at sites like Toronto’s Humber Bay, Peel’s Rattray Marsh and Durham’s Corner Marsh. Demand dictated that they offer selected field trips to a wide variety of Ontario locations, including Point Pelee National Park, Presqu’ile Provincial Park, Long Point Provincial Park, Hilton Falls/Mountsberg Conservation Area, Niagara Falls, Tiny Marsh/ Minesing Swamp, the Durham Region marshes from Pickering to Oshawa, Dundas Marsh, Holland Marsh, Uxbridge forest and Luther Marsh, Prince Edward County and the Bruce Peninsula. They also went on to organize and conduct much longer trips to places such as Alberta, British Columbia, Churchill and southern Manitoba, Grand Manan, Newfoundland, southern Arizona, southern California, Florida, Texas, and farther afield to Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom (England and Scotland). Clive and Joy enriched the knowledge and birding skills of scores of Ontario naturalists in this period.

Clive is perhaps most widely known for his five major publications dealing with bird finding. Inspired by the very popular Toronto Birdfinding bulletins published in the 1960s by Peter Iden, Clive recognized the need for a standard reference to make the multitude of new birders familiar with the most productive birding sites in the Toronto area. In 1977, he began the field work, writing, editing and design of his 97 page Toronto Bird Finding Guide, published by the Toronto Field Naturalists in 1979. Even many long-time Toronto area birders learned a lot of new locations from this book. In 1982, University of Toronto Press published the first edition of Clive’s 248 page A Bird-Finding Guide to Ontario. This handy guide made birders familiar with many of the best birding locations throughout Ontario, how to get to them, and what to see there at particular times of the year. Although many of the veteran birders in Ontario were in the regular habit of covering their local sewage lagoons, sod farms and landfill sites, this guide was the first to introduce the next generation of birders to the very productive results of birding at such locations, and provided directions to almost all of these previously seldom sought out sites, and truly popularized this as a normal part of birding practice in Ontario.

In 1988, Clive and Joy independently published their expanded 153 page second edition of their A Birdfinding Guide to the Toronto Region. This new edition added sections on new sites, provided a newly-researched set of occurrence bar charts to demonstrate the abundance and seasonal status of all bird species, and provided a summary of the status of all the various rarities on the Toronto checklist. It has served as an excellent resource and starting point for those interested in birding throughout the Greater Toronto Area ever since. In 1995, University of Toronto Press published the greatly expanded and revised 477 page second edition of A Bird-Finding Guide to Ontario. At one time or another, most of the birders we know have had this volume either in their car or their library. Its proven utility and commercial viability no doubt encouraged the production of more detailed local bird finding guides, excellent examples of which are the Point Pelee guide written by Tom Hince and the Long Point and area guide by Ron Ridout.

In 1990, Clive and Joy moved from Toronto to Cobourg, where they eventually retired in 1996. Already familiar with Presqu’ile Provincial Park, they began to immerse themselves in a project to explore all of the roads of Northumberland County, an area with a rich ornithological history dating back to the early 18th century exploits of Charles Fothergill, the father of Ontario ornithology himself. Although the prevailing conventional wisdom of the scientific community had long tended to dismiss the potential value in birders’ observations, Clive always held to the position that, cumulatively, these could yield valuable information not otherwise easily available. With this aim in mind, he convinced the Willow Beach Field Naturalists to embark on a mission to computerize all of the available Northumberland County bird records into a relational database. Fast forward 25 years to the era of eBird, and one sees that the scientific community has come back to Clive’s line of thinking on such matters and Clive’s vision begins to look as clear as that of Nostradamus! In conjunction with Dr. Steve Furino of the University of Waterloo, Clive and the Willow Beach Field Naturalists have created a database approaching 400,000 bird records for Northumberland County. Since 2007, they have also worked diligently to see all of these data (in the form of 38,503 general club ‘checklists’ and 9,381 personal ‘checklists’ of Clive’s own records) exported into eBird, thus enabling access to the general public. However, not content to merely compile the data, Clive set to work on writing a monograph on the Birds of Northumberland County using the data. He has shared this monograph freely as an electronic document via a web site of the Willow Beach Field Naturalist at: http://www.willowbeachfieldnaturalists.org/assets/bird-assets/downloads/Birds.pdf

If Clive’s only accomplishments had been his editorial tenure at Audubon Field Notes/American Birds and his bird finding guides, he would easily still qualify for this award, but we think you can see that his vision and determination have blessed us all with a much more comprehensive body of work to benefit from for many years to come.

Clive has been the recipient of several other awards. In 1976, he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Award of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists. In 1977, he was awarded Honorary Life Membership in the Conservation Council of Ontario. In 2009, he was awarded the Doris Huestis Speirs Award for outstanding contributions to Canadian Ornithology by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists. In 2010, he was awarded Honorary Life Membership by the Willow Beach Field Naturalists. Congratulations on your award Clive — it is certainly richly deserved.

Jon McCracken is a modest, low-key kind of person, who surely does not think of himself as a “Distinguished Ornithologist.” Yet, there is scarcely a person more immersed in learning about Ontario and Canada’s birds, or more deeply involved in working for their welfare. People who don’t know Jon personally are nonetheless very likely to know about the programs he has helped organize and the conservation issues he has brought to the forefront of the birding and ornithological world.

After graduating from the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in 1977, Jon took on what may be a record number of biology contract positions. Over a period of 12 years, he worked on encephalitis incidence in birds, ran the banding program at Long Point Bird Observatory, monitored paper mill effluent, studied lead-shot poisoning of waterfowl, evaluated wetland quality, examined the impact of logging on heronries and undertook a slew of floral, faunal and habitat surveys. Jon’s employers included non-governmental organizations (Norfolk Field Naturalists, Long Point Bird Observatory), business and academic institutions (Eurocan Pulp and Paper, LGL Ltd., Western University [WU]) and government (Canadian Wildlife Service, Transport Canada, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario Ministry of Health, Grand River Conservation Authority).

While many biologists do contract work while looking for a ‘real’ job, they often bail out of biology altogether, or go back to school if one of those doesn”t come along. Jon did consider returning to university for a graduate degree, but he was a good biologist and other opportunities kept arising, and he loved what he was doing. Although he admits to having some regrets about not pursuing another degree, it’s not for the reason you might think – that it might have led him on a different career path. Rather, like a true scientist, he regrets the lost learning opportunities.

Indeed, life-long learning is one of Jon’s main satisfactions, and certainly one of his greatest assets. When he told me about his mentors, who included David Hussell and Michael Bradstreet at Long Point, Dave Ankney and Dave Scott at WU, and later on, Don Sutherland and Mary Gartshore, Jon noted that he learned ‘a ton’ from these people and from many others along the way.

When many of us think of mentors, we generally consider the ones that influence us as adults, but those people and incidents that fan the early spark are equally, if not more, important. Jon spent his early years in the Prairies, where he was fascinated by flight, both of birds and airplanes. There was a cage in his backyard where, as in many Prairie homes of the era, wild birds were sometimes kept. Jon remembers that cage at various times holding a Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia), a Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus) and a Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus). An older brother who liked to draw birds introduced Jon to more formal ornithology. After the family moved to Ottawa, this brother took Jon, then in Grade 3, to look at bird skins at the Museum of Nature. Jon was awed at meeting real professionals – Earl Godfrey and Stu MacDonald – and was greatly impressed. (Indeed, he suspects he was also impressed by his brother surreptitiously whacking him to curb his enthusiasm.) Another seminal experience was receiving a gift of Fred Bodworth’s classic book The Last of the Curlews. Later, Jon was thrilled to meet and get to know the author. Many of us in the Ontario Field Ornithologists have opportunities to provide such experiences to a young person who is showing interest, and we sometimes need to remind ourselves how important a little encouragement can be.

Jon advanced steadily during his long period of contract work. Starting as an assistant, he rose to the person in charge of study design, training, project management and preparation of reports – all skills he has used daily in the full-time positions he has held at Bird Studies Canada since 1989: first as Manager for the Migration Monitoring Program, then Ontario Programs Manager, and now National Programs Manager.

Jon’s career at Bird Studies Canada, as with his earlier contract work, has been incredibly varied. He has been responsible for special surveys of loons, marsh birds, Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus), nocturnal owls, certain woodpeckers, and programs such as migration monitoring, the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, Great Backyard Bird Count, training of Latin American biologists, and a variety of species-at-risk assessment and recovery programs. While the job at Bird Studies Canada (BSC) is more than full time, it is far from everything that Jon does. He is also a valuable member of innumerable committees, boards and panels. His curriculum vitae lists 28 committees, including many species-at-risk recovery teams, the North American Banding Council and the North American Ornithological Atlas Committee. Jon is also a subject editor for the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology.

Not even included in this list of 28 is perhaps the most influential group with which Jon serves, the Bird Species Specialist Subcommittee of COSEWIC (the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada). As co-chair of this subcommittee, Jon shares the lead in identifying candidate species for assessment, tendering contracts for status reports of those candidates, evaluating subsequent reports and making appropriate recommendations for official COSEWIC status. The work involves many time-consuming administrative duties, and Jon gets the job done – but I suspect his most important contribution is clear-headed thinking about the kinds and quality of evidence needed to confidently assign an appropriate conservation status.

On top of his job at BSC and his committee service to the ornithological community, Jon is also a prolific writer. While he has relatively few research papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, his bibliography of about 160 articles is replete with technical reports, species status assessments, recovery plans, training manuals and data-rich articles that raise awareness of the informed public about bird study and avian conservation issues (including several in Ontario Birds). His publications not only reflect the great variety of programs and projects in which he has been involved (see sample below), but also demonstrate a most enviable facility for clear communication. One might think that Jon’s administrative responsibilities, committee work and writing would be sufficient to keep him busy, but he refuses to be cut off from doing field work. Jon is out nearly every morning during the field season, keeping in touch with the birds that his work is really about.

To summarize Jon’s contributions to ornithology in Ontario and Canada, then, I would say that he is a well-rounded birder and field man, a talented administrator and designer of field programs, an excellent writer and a hands-on conservation biologist – altogether a combination that makes him more than worthy of the title of “Distinguished Ornithologist.”

Jim was born and raised in Oshawa, and he first took an interest in nature at age 7. At age 10, he took up the hobby of collecting birds’ eggs. By his early teens, Jim was hooked on birding and he was issued a collecting permit by the Canadian Wildlife Service in 1964 and a banding permit in 1968.

In 1974, Jim (together with his friend and fellow DOA recipient, Ron Tozer) co-authored Birds of the Oshawa-Lake Scugog Region, Ontario, considered to be one of the most well-respected regional bird monographs ever produced in Ontario. A dedicated conservationist, Jim founded the Second Marsh Defence Association (now the Friends of Second Marsh) and successfully advocated against development in the area over a period of 20 years. Later, Jim persuaded his employer at the time, General Motors of Canada, to convert a significant portion of the property acquired for its new corporate headquarters into wildlife habitat. This property is adjacent to the Oshawa Second Marsh which he has worked so passionately to preserve.

As well, Jim is an accomplished nature photographer whose photographs have appeared on the covers of numerous publications including A Nature Guide to Ontario, The Birds of Presqu’ile Provincial Park, Ontario Birds at Risk – Status and Conservation, Oak Ridges Moraine and Birds Worth Watching. His photographic documentation of the nesting Little Gulls in Durham Region in the early 1970s represents the best work on this species in North America. In addition, Jim documented the first Durham Region nest records of Ruddy Duck, Black-crowned Night-Heron, Northern Goshawk and Brewer’s Blackbird.

Jim is a devoted husband, father and grandfather who is eager to acknowledge his family for their support and understanding.

David Brewer began birding about the age of 12 in England. He obtained his first bird banding permit from the British Trust for Ornithology at age 17 and has held a Canadian banding permit since 1971. He became an authority on molts, plumages and identification.

David was a founding life member of OFO in 1982. He also was a founding member of the Ontario Bird Records Committee 1982 to 1985, served as Chair in 1985, and was a voting member again from 1996 to 1998. David has published many articles, letters and book reviews in Ontario Birds and OFO News. He presented a popular bird quiz at OFO Annual Conventions for several years.

He participated in both Breeding Bird Atlases and wrote the species accounts for House Wren, Winter Wren and Sedge Wren in the second atlas. David authored The Birds of Wellington County in 1976 and co-authored with artist Barry MacKay A Guide to the Wrens, Dippers and Thrashers of the World in 2001.

David retired recently as a research chemist in Guelph. He now spends his time birding and leading trips throughout the world.