KEVIN MCGOWAN 
I have been the Curator of birds and mammals at Cornell University 
since 1988. I am directly responsible for the extensive collections of bird 
and mammal skins, skeletons, tissues, and birds 7 eggs and nests. I 
received my Ph.D. in biology in 1987 from the University of South Florida 
for a study of the social development of young Florida Scrub-Jays. My 
current research deals primarily with the social and reproductive biology 
of crows. As a broadly-trained ornithologist, I am also interested in a 
wide range of topics, including systematics, evolution, biogeography, 
natural history, and ecology. I am an Elected Member of the American 
Ornithologists 7 Union, former Secretary of the Ornithological Societies of 
North America (OSNA), and the former editor of the Ornithological 
Newsletter a bi-monthly publication of OSNA. Blurring the line between 
my professional and private life, I have been an avocational birder since 
my childhood in Ohio (my written notes date to 1971). I have traveled 
throughout North America, as well as to Europe, Central America, South 
America, and Africa, watching and studying birds. I have led birding 
field trips for groups of all skill levels in Ohio, New York, New Jersey, 
Florida, and Hawaii. I have been a member of the Cornell Laboratory of 
Ornithology's "Sapsuckers" World Series of Birding team for ten years. 
(We finished second overall in 1999 with 220 species seen in one day.) I 
am very interested in the topics of bird distribution and identification, 
and am equally interested in educating the birding public about those 
subjects. 
ROBERT O. PAXTON 
I was bom in Lexington, Virginia, in 1932.1 have been an avid field 
birder since the age of nine. Professionally, I worked as a professor of 
modem European history, publishing works on the history of France dur¬ 
ing the German occupation of 1940-44. taught at the University of 
California at Berkeley from 1961 to 1967, at the State University of New 
York at Stony Brook from 1967 to 1969, and at Columbia University from 
1969 until retirement in 1997. 
In California, I participated in founding the Point Reyes Bird 
Observatory, and served as one of the regional editors for Audubon Field 
Notes for the Middle Pacific Coast Region from 1963 to 1967. After mov¬ 
ing to New York, I continued to write for Field Notes and its successors 
The Kingbird 2000 March; 50(1) 
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