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For information on submitting an obituary, please contact Reading Eagle by phone at 610-371-5018, or email at obituaries@readingeagle.com or fax at 610-371-5193. Most obituaries published in the Reading Eagle are submitted through funeral homes and cremation services, but we will accept submissions from families. Obituaries can be emailed to obituaries@readingeagle.com. In addition to the text of the obituary, any photographs that you wish to include can be attached to this email. Please put the text of the obituary in a Word document, a Google document or in the body of the email. The Reading Eagle also requires a way to verify the death, so please include either the phone number of the funeral home or cremation service that is in charge of the deceased's care or a photo of his/her death certificate. We also request that your full name, phone number and address are all included in this email. All payments by families must be made with a credit card. We will send a proof of the completed obituary before we require payment. The obituary cannot run, however, until we receive payment in full. Obituaries can be submitted for any future date, but they must be received no later than 3:00 p.m. the day prior to its running for it to be published. Please call the obituary desk, at 610-371-5018, for information on pricing. For Berks Nature President Kim Murphy’s swan song at her final State of the Environment Breakfast last week, it was fitting that she featured an ornithologist as the main speaker. Murphy will be stepping down as head of the conservation organization in December after 21 years at the helm. She tapped Scott Weidensaul, the most popular birder and citizen scientist in the region, to deliver the keynote address based on his latest book about the worldwide migration of birds. And as migration signals a transition of the seasons, so too did the breakfast represent a transition in Berks Nature’s leadership, as Tami Shimp, who has been a part of the organization for nearly 30 years, was named the new president. Shimp thanked Murphy for her leadership in an emotional moment following the announcement at the conclusion of the breakfast last Thursday. “There is so much more work in land protection and environmental education for Berks Nature to do,” Shimp said, “and I am thrilled to be asked to lead the team and those efforts.” Over 350 people attended the 17th annual breakfast at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Reading to bid farewell to Murphy and to hear Weidensaul, a Schuylkill County native who now lives in New Hampshire. Students from Gov. Mifflin and Brandywine Heights high schools and Reading Area Community College and Alvernia University were also in attendance. “This morning is a little bittersweet for me as it is the last time I will stand before you as Berks Nature’s president,” Murphy said before outlining the achievements of the previous year that included protection of three different properties covering 762 acres of open space, bringing a total of over 11,000 acres of land protected or owned by Berks Nature. She noted that over 85 families participated in the nature preschool and eco-camp before introducing Weidensaul, who has authored more than 30 books, including “Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds,” a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. Weidensaul quickly demonstrated why he has been a popular speaker to nature groups in Berks. He told the story how at age 12 he first visited Hawk Mountain Sanctuary on a good flight day and enthusiastically embraced hawk watching to the detriment of those around him. “Nothing in the sky looked like the pictures in the field guides, but when you’re 12 it doesn’t matter,” he said to laughter from the audience. “I was yelling out identifications in my worst outside voice, and there was a woman sitting on the rocks, and every time I misidentified a bird she kind of winced.” Finally, after some egregious misidentifications, she couldn’t take it anymore. “She said, ‘Son, sit down here, and we’re going to talk,’” he said. She started teaching him and became his first mentor. That experience hooked him on a love for raptors and the Appalachian Mountains. He attended Kutztown University for a time in the late 1970s and encountered an ornithology class with Sam Gundy, another Berks legend in natural history circles who was previously the director of the Reading Public Museum and who was in his final year teaching at Kutztown before retirement. Gundy set Weidensaul on a path from which he would not deviate. Weidensaul left Kutztown and embarked on a career of writing about birds and natural history and leading scientific studies on bird migration. He detailed in his talk the extraordinary physical achievements that bird migration entails and the wonder of how the birds navigate to arrive at their destinations. Despite that the world has lost a third of the bird population in over a generation, he finds hope. “I could argue that given what we’ve done to the planet in the last 15 years, the fact that we still have two-thirds of North American birds is pretty good news,” he said. He points out that raptors have rebounded dramatically with protections and the banning of persistent chemicals in the environment. Waterfowl numbers have been increasing after cratering in the 1980s. “We know how to fix the problem,” he said. “All it takes is the political will.” Weidensaul made an eloquent appeal, noting that the work of Berks Nature is deeply personal to him as the old farmhouse in which he used to live has been protected by an easement. “For better or worse,” he concluded, “the future is in our hands, and the work that Berks Nature is doing in Berks County is absolutely critical for the wider picture of bird conservation here and in Pennsylvania.”
