REGISTER NOW for our annual fundraiser, the Party to Preserve, from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, 2014, at Daffin House Farm in Hillsboro. The focus of the party’s auction will be experiencing the Eastern Shore – and beyond. Spend a week at a guest house at the edge of Grand Teton National Park in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and watch moose and elk in their habitat. The house includes a queen bed and space for a child or two. A treehouse provides additional fun. Package includes a round of golf for two at the Jackson Hole Golf and Tennis Club and a docent tour of the National Museum of Wildlife. Birders can bid on a migratory bird banding at Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory at Chino Farms and lunch at the Imperial Hotel. A late spring morning just after a warm front passes will produce a bounty of neotropical migrant birds in their finest mating plumage. These jewels are caught in ultra-fine mist nets, taken to a banding lab where they are weighed, aged and banded. Then, they are released unharmed to continue the northward journey to their habitual nesting areas. The Nature Conservancy Maryland/DC Chapter will provide a guided kayak trip for four on Nassawango Creek with a conservationist. This preserve is one of the northernmost remaining examples of a bald cypress swamp. The Nature Conservancy has protected 9,953 of swamp and upland forest along this creek. Stop along the way to enjoy wine and cheese among the water lilies and cypress. Prefer a history lesson? Join Dr. Scott Wing, head of the Smithsonian Institution’s Paleobiology Department, for a tour of the National Museum of Natural History. The paleobiology department focuses on fossil plants and the history of climate change between 70 and 40 million years ago, the last...