ABA Blog Authors

We thank all of the Authors who contribute to this Blog.

Nate Swick
www.thedrinkingbirdblog.com

The editor of the ABA Blog, and a long-time member of the bird blogosphere, Nate Swick has been writing about birds and birding at The Drinking Bird since 2007, but can also be found writing about the southeast at 10,000 Birds and managing that site's popular I and the Bird carnival. In the non-digital world he reviews eBird records for North Carolina and works as an interpretive naturalist and environmental educator for several non-profits. Nate lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Danielle, and young son, Noah, who is not yet aware that he is being groomed to be a birder.

 

 

George Armistead
http://events.aba.org/

George Armistead is a lifelong birder and, since April 2012, is the events coordinator for the ABA. George spent the prior decade organizing and leading birding tours for Field Guides Inc. He has guided trips on all seven continents, and enjoys vast open country habitats and seabirds most of all. Based in Philadelphia, he is an associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and spends much of his free time birding the coast between Cape May, NJ and Cape Hatteras, NC.

 

Lynn E. Barber
lynnbarberbirding.blogspot.com

ABA Board member Lynn Barber started birding at the age of 7. In 2005, she broke the Texas big year record with 522 species, and in 2008, she tallied 723 bird species in the ABA Area. An account of her ABA Big Year, entitled Extreme Birder: One Woman’s Big Year, was published in the spring of 2011. While living in North Carolina, Lynn was active in Wake County Audubon and on the board of the Carolina Bird Club. Moving to Texas in 2000, she was active in the Fort Worth Audubon Society, serving as its president for 3 years. She is a life member of the Texas Ornithological Society, and became its president in April 2009.  She now lives in Rapid City, South Dakota.

 

Jeff Bouton
en.leica-camera.com/sport_optics

Jeff Bouton began working as "binoculars for hire" as a teenager, working countless seasonal field research positions for varying state & federal agencies and non-for-profit organizations across the country. After a decade of the bird bum life, he decided he preferred sharing his passion for the outdoors with others and began guiding trips professionally; mostly in Alaska where he was living at the time. While guiding trips at the ABA convention in McAllen, Texas (May 2004), Jeff accepted the position as the birding naturalist rep for Leica Sport Optics, USA and now works as the Marketing Manager here. Over the past decade, Jeff has written more than 50 articles and had hundreds of his digiscoped wildlife images published in major birding magazines. He is a contributing author on past ABA Birdfinding guides to Alaska & Florida respectively, and the Houghton Mifflin title "Good Birder's Don't Wear White".

 

Laura Erickson
www.lauraerickson.blogspot.com

Laura Erickson has been in love with birds since she was a small child. She started birding after she received binoculars and a field guide for Christmas in 1974. Since then, her philosophy of life has been that “no one should go through life listlessly,” and she’s devoted herself to promoting the love, understanding, and protection of birds. She’s served as science editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, rehabbed wild birds for over two decades, written five books about birds, contributed to Audubon, Birding, and BirdWatching magazine, and for the past 25 years has produced, as an unpaid volunteer for several community radio stations, a daily radio spot about birds podcast. Laura lives with an Eastern Screech-Owl licensed for education as well as her amazingly tolerant non-birder husband.

 

Ted Floyd
profile.typepad.com/tfloyd

Ted Floyd is the Editor of Birding magazine, and he is broadly involved in other programs and initiatives of the ABA. He is the author of more than 100 magazine and journal articles, and he is the author of three recent books, including an ABA title, Let’s Go Birding! Floyd is a frequent speaker at birding festivals and state ornithological society meetings, and he has served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations. Mainly, he listens to birds at night.

 

 

Jeff Gordon
www.jeffreyagordon.com

Jeff Gordon is the president of the American Birding Association. There's very little about birds, birding, and birders that he doesn't find fascinating, though he's especially interested in birding culture and the many ways we all communicate our passion for birds, including this Blog.

 

Paul Hess

Paul Hess, the Birding “News and Notes” Department Editor, started watching birds at age 7 in Los Angeles. Now a retired newspaper editor in Pennsylvania, he formerly chaired the Pennsylvania Ornithological Records Committee, has contributed many articles to the journal Pennsylvania Birds, writes an ornithological news column for the Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology newsletter, edits the Three Rivers Birding Club newsletter in Pittsburgh, and has coauthored several National Geographic books on birds. Paul has received prominent awards for outstanding contributions to Pennsylvania ornithology and for bird conservation efforts in the state.

 

Blake Mathys
www.blakemathys.com

Blake Mathys completed his Ph.D. at Rutgers in 2010, studying evolution of birds introduced to islands. His field work was in Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Trinidad, and was complemented by museum research. Prior to graduate school, he worked with Cape Sable Seaside Sparrows in Everglades National Park, as a hawk counter in Washington State, on the Farallon Islands studying Northern Elephant Seals for PRBO Conservation Science, and sampling fish for the Ohio EPA. Blake and his wife Dimitria recently moved to Ohio, and he hopes to find a university position (or some other sort of gainful employment). Aside from birds, he maintains a fascination with salamanders, mammals, and anything else with a backbone.

 

Robert Mortenson
http://www.birdingisfun.com/

Robert is most widely known as the host of www.BirdingIsFun.com, a multi-author blog sharing enthusiasm for birds and birding. He is also the ABA's Bird of the Year program coordinator.

Robert began birding in the summer of 2004 when his father-in-law handed him a pair of binoculars to go on a Sunday afternoon walk at Deer Flat Wildlife Refuge in Idaho. Birding was an instant addiction. Married to Jessica since 1999, they have four children that keep them hopping. They live in Boise, Idaho. 

 

Greg Neise
www.nabirding.com

Greg Neise developed his interests in birds, photography and conservation as a youngster growing up in Chicago, across the street from Lincoln Park Zoo. At the age of 13, he worked alongside Dr. William S. Beecher, then Director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and a pioneering ornithologist, and learned to photograph wildlife, an interest that developed into a career supplying images for magazines, newspapers, institutions and books, including National Geographic (print, web and television), Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, Nature, Lincoln Park Zoo, Miami Zoo, Jacksonville Zoo, The Field Museum and a host of others. He has served as President of the Rainforest Conservation Fund, a volunteer organization dedicated to preserving the world's tropical rainforests. Greg is a web developer for the ABA, and of course, a fanatical birder.

 

Ann Nightingale

Ann Nightingale (and yes, that is her real name) is an avid birder and amateur naturalist. A relative late-comer to birding, Ann took up the binoculars and scope in the mid 1990’s and has been making up for lost time since. Ann serves on the board of Rocky Point Bird Observatory, a migration monitoring station on the southern tip of Vancouver Island (the place with the Skylarks!) She first volunteered at RPBO in 1997 and over the years has become a licensed passerine, hummingbird and owl bander. Also active with the Victoria Natural History Society, Ann leads local birding field trips and coordinates the Christmas Bird Count for the Victoria circle. Recently she has added coordination of southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands for the British Columbia Breeding Bird Atlas to her “administrative birding” activities.

 

  John Puschock
www.zbirdtours.com

John Puschock reports ABA rare bird alerts and manages #ABArare for the American Birding Association. John is a frequent participant in rare bird forums around the web and has knack for gathering details necessary to relocate birds. He has been a birder since 1984 and now leads tours for Bird Treks, as well as for his own company Zugunruhe Birding Tours. He has led tours to locations across North America, from Newfoundland to New Mexico and from Costa Rica to Alaska. He specializes in leading tours to Adak in the Aleutian Islands.

 

Michael Retter
www.xenospiza.com

Michael L. P. Retter guides for Tropical Birding in the Americas and Australasia. Birding since the age of six, Michael is especially interested in taxonomy and distribution, though he also has an inherently masochistic interest in four-year gulls. As an artist and author, Michael's work has appeared in Birding (where he serves as both Technical Reviewer and "Sightings" Department Editor) and Meadowlark, among other books and journals. He also runs GBNA, the continent's email listserv for GLBT birders. Michael currently resides in West Lafayette, Indiana with his partner, Matt.

 

Bill Schmoker
brdpics.blogspot.com

Bill is known in the birding community as a leading digital photographer of birds. Since 2001 he has built a collection of digital bird photos documenting over 600 species of North American birds. His photography has appeared in international nature publications, books, newspapers, interpretive signs, web pages, advertisements, corporate logos, and as references for art works. Also a published writer, Bill wrote a chapter for Good Birders Don't Wear White, is a Colorado/Wyoming regional editor for North American Birds and writes the Geared for Birding column in Winging It (the American Birding Association’s newsletter.) Bill is especially fond of his involvement with the ABA's Institute for Field Ornithology and Young Birder Programs. Bill is a popular birding guide, speaker, and workshop instructor and is proud to be a Nikon Birding Prostaffer. Other experiences of Bill’s include conducting fieldwork for Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory and serving as president of Colorado Field Ornithologists. Bill teaches middle school science in Boulder, Colorado when he isn’t birding and he enjoys family time with his wife and son.

 

Noah Strycker
noahstrycker.com

Noah Strycker, Associate Editor of Birding magazine, is on a mission to observe, study, photograph, draw, and write about as many birds as possible, at home in Oregon and worldwide. Noah’s bird photographs and articles have appeared in all major birding magazines, and his recent book, Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica (Oregon State University Press, 2011), chronicles his adventures with a quarter million Adélie Penguins on the world’s windiest, coldest, driest, highest, least populated, and most remote continent.

 

Drew Weber
www.thenemesisbird.com

Drew Weber is an ornithologist originally from Pennsylvania but now living in central New York. He is finishing up a master's degree at Penn State University on grassland bird conservation. Drew is active in the Pennsylvania birding community as chairman of the bird records committee, serves as a board member for the Pennsylvania Ornithological Society and is a reviewer for sightings submitted to eBird. His passions include figuring out how new technology can be used for birding, introducing people to birding and getting more people to use eBird.

Rick Wright
birdaz.com/Blog/

Rick Wright studied French, German, philosophy, and biology at the University of Nebraska. Following a detour to Harvard Law School, he took the Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1990. He held appointments as Assistant Professor of German at the University of Illinois, Reader in Art and Archaeology at Princeton, and Associate Professor of Medieval Studies at Fordham. Now a Senior Leader with WINGS, Rick was a department editor at Birding from 2004 to 2008 and editor of Winging It from 2005 to 2007. Rick lives in northern New Jersey with his wife, Alison Beringer, and their chocolate lab, Gellert.