Scott Weidensaul Video
“The Cradle: Philadelphia and the Birth of American Ornithology”
During the Academy's 198th Annual Meeting on May 25, 2010, Scott Weidensaul was awarded the Richard Hopper Day Memorial Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions in interpreting the natural sciences to the public.
His keynote speech for the meeting, “The Cradle: Philadelphia and the Birth of American Ornithology,” revealed the long and illustrious history of Ornithology at the Academy of Natural Sciences and in the Philadelphia region. Starting in the first decades of the new republic with such notables as William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, Thomas Nuttall, and John James Audubon, Weidensaul follows the narrative through to the present day. Along the way, he covers such topics as arsenic poisoning, women in science, the first Christmas Bird Count, and the rise of the Conservation Movement in America.
