Collaboration. Creativity. Abundance of birds. These are all hallmarks of the last 30 years in Chicago bird conservation. Our lakefront and large parks transformed from sterile lawns to thriving migrant habitats. In our forest preserves, fragmented hay fields and picnic groves became the state’s most successful breeding grounds for grassland birds. The nation’s first Lights Out program, the precursor to ebird, a city-endorsed Bird Agenda - all were products of the interactions of an inspired birding community and engaged public officials. Come and learn the history of many of the wonderful habitats we bird in today.

Over Josh's lifetime of birding, he's seen a lot of birds and learned a lot about birding and about birders. Through personal stories, he will take you around the globe, using birds and places as reference points for lessons he has learned. 

Josh has been a part of the Chicago birding community since the early 1990s, when he started birding as a middle school student in Evanston. He spent many years as a bird researcher at the Field Museum and as an international birding guide before founding Red Hill Birding in 2016. These days, he organizes and leads birding tours in the Chicago area, across the US, and around the globe.

Often approached with apprehension, gulls have gained a love-hate relationship with many birders. Among these larids are some of the most coveted bird species in the world. Amar will highlight key identification field marks for separating our most common gull species, and he will also touch on some of the often-ignored topics in gull-study such as the aging process, plumage and molt. Come learn why an increasing number of people are being drawn to this family of birds and are eagerly calling themselves “larophiles".

The Field Museum is unique among major Natural History Museums for the extent to which it archives birds that have died colliding with buildings. This four-decades-long database has facilitated science that would be impossible without its volume of birds and temporal scope. In this talk, graduate students Jacob Drucker and Madison Chudzik will highlight some of this research that informs conservation action within Chicagoland and beyond.