The authors are a husband and wife team who have studied the breeding biology, habitat selection, and environmental contamination of gulls, terns, skimmers, and other colonial seabirds on most continents. In addition to editing various books on birds and their environment, Burger and Gochfeld have written The Black Skimmer: Social Dynamics of a Colonial Species (1990) and The Common Tern: Its Breeding Biology and Social Behavior (1991), both published by Columbia University Press.
Michael Gochfeld received a B.A. degree from Oberlin College (1961), an M.D. degree from Albert Einstein College (1965), and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York (1975). He completed post-doctoral studies at Rockfeller University in animal behavior. He has studied the breeding biology of gulls, terns, and skimmers in the eastern United States as well as a variety of species in South America, Africa, and Asia. He has edited books on hazardous waste and environmental medicine. He is Professor of Environmental and Community Medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson (formerly Rutgers) Medical School in New Jersey, where he specializes in environmental toxicology. Current address: Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, 681 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08855.
Joanna Burger began studying breeding shorebirds and migrant gulls on her parent’s farm along the Mohawk River at Niskayuna, New York. She received a B.A. degree from the State University of New York at Albany (1963), an M.S. from Cornell University (1964), and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (1972) under H. B. Tordoff for her study of the breeding behavior of the Franklin’s Gull at Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge. She continued her post-doctoral work on marsh-nesting gulls, studying the Black-headed Gull at Ravenglass under Niko Tinbergen (Oxford) and the Brown-headed Gull in Argentina under Colin Beer (Institute for Animal Behavior, New Jersey). For the past 20 years she has studied the breeding populations of skimmers and terns in New Jersey and Long Island, New York. Her studies have extended from social behavior, habitat selection, chemical ecology, and breeding biology to environmental toxicology. She has edited three volumes on the behavior of seabirds and shorebirds, a book on interactions among marine organisms, and a book on the ecological aftermath of the Arthur Kill oil spill. She has taught ecology and behavior at Rutgers University since 1973 and is now Professor of Biological Sciences. Current address: Department of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08855.
