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7 August 2003--MEETINGS I PLAN TO ATTEND. During the rest of 2003, I plan to attend the following meetings: Birdlife Americas Regional Meeting, Paraguay, August; Sustainable Coffee meeting, Colombia, September; Neotropical Ornithology Congress, Chile, October; VII Congreso, Sociedad Mesoamericana para la Biologia y la Conservacion, Chiapas, November.
7 August 2003--NEW POSITION. I moved to El Salvador today to begin work full-time as the Director of Conservation Science for the non-profit organization SalvaNATURA, the local Birdlife International partner. I plan to defend my Ph.D. dissertation during the coming spring semester. At SalvaNATURA I will be directing local and regional conservation research projects. Initial projects are funded by Shell Oil, Rainforest Alliance, American Bird Conservancy, and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (grants totalling $137,500). We also received a $20,000 grant from the Wildlife Conservation Society to help develop the new program, which has a regional focus of northern Central America. New contact information.
1 August 2003--NEW PUBLICATION. My article about West Nile virus in the Dominican Republic (coauthored with 10 other authors, including my brother Nick) now appears in the contents of the October issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases. It should be available on-line by the end of August.
31 July 2003--NEW PUBLICATIONS. The December 2002 issue of the Wilson Bulletin was published this month, with two short notes about unusual feeding behaviors of birds: the Fan-tailed Warbler and the Turquoise-browed Motmot. See the Peer-reviewed Publications Page for complete citations. My coauthors were Cullen Hanks and Walter Thurber.
8 May 2003--TORNADO! Some people live in "Tornado Alley" their whole lives and never see one. At 7:40 pm, Brett Benz and I watched from the museum's 7th floor as a tornado touched down 5 miles away. We had 45 minutes' warning from storm trackers on the TV news! The city's warning sirens sounded. After a minute, the twister moved up into the clouds. Ten minutes later, the swirling clouds passed within a mile of the museum. About 95 structures were damaged in Lawrence, including roofs blown off of apartment buildings, by the F1 or F2 tornado. Nobody was hurt! This week produced more tornados in the U.S. (over 300) than during any week since they began counting (in the 1950s).
31 March 2003--NEW PUBLICATIONS. I had two peer-reviewed articles published this month: Autumn bird migration in coastal El Salvador, published in the journal Ornitología Neotropical, and Estado de los crácidos (Galliformes: Cracidae) en El Salvador: una actualización, published in Spanish, English and Portuguese in the Boletín de El IUCN/Birdlife/WPA Grupo de Especialistas en Crácidos.
21 March 2003--IT'S A GIRL!! Our first child, Lorena Yvonne Komar Rosales, whom we will call Yvonne, arrived this morning at 8:14 Central Daylight Time, weighing 6 lbs 9 ounces, and measuring 19 inches (about 50 cm). She is adorable, and she and her mother are in excellent condition. They are expected home from the hospital on Monday, 24 March. Here is the photo.
13 March 2003--WEST NILE VIRUS DISCOVERED IN CARIBBEAN. A team of ornithologists from the University of Kansas, led by Mark B. Robbins, Oliver Komar and A. Townsend Peterson, recently discovered the West Nile virus in bird populations in the Caribbean island nation of the Dominican Republic. The research team announced today that five blood samples from birds collected in November contained antibodies for the virus. Click on the link for the KU News Release. The information was also released today in the Dominican Republic by local health authorities.
10 March 2003--BOOK PUBLISHED. El Imposible National Park and its Wildlife, the second number of SalvaNATURA's Biodiversity Series, was published today. Juan Marco Alvarez and Oliver Komar are the editors. For contents and ordering information, click on the link.
10 January 2003--NEW BIRD DISCOVERED FOR EL SALVADOR'S BIRD LIST. Tom Jenner found a vagrant Larus glaucescens at the mouth of the Río Jiboa in El Salvador, on 7 January. He sent me
excellent photos which I have made available on-line. This may be the first record for Central America. the species breeds on the west coast of North America from Oregon to Alaska.
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