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Guest Speaker: Maria Mudd-Ruth

The Salish Sea is home to a fascinating family of diving seabirds known as auks, or alcids. Though often described as “awkward” or “clumsy” in field guides, these web-footed birds are amazingly well adapted to life in the air, on land, and especially at sea. Maria will talk about two of her favorite auks—the shy, cryptic, secretive, tree-nesting Marbled Murrelet (the subject of her 2005 book, Rare Bird) and its clownish, extroverted, burrow-nesting cousin, the Pigeon Guillemot (the subject of her next book).

Maria is the author of more than a dozen books on natural history topics for children and adults. She is the author of Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet, a narrative natural history an endearing and endangered seabird. Her most recent book of non-fiction, A Sideways Look at Cloud, was awarded the Nautilus Silver Medal in 2017. She lives with her husband in Olympia, Washington where she is working on two books--on Pigeon Guillemots and on lake swimming and lake ecology in Washington.