News: VENTflash Archive
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Catch up on the latest news from Victor Emanuel Nature Tours by reading the latest VENTFLASH.
VENTFLASH #96
Victor Emanuel: Jan 02, 09
January 2, 2009 Dear Friends,Christmas is about traditions. One tradition I have maintained for over 50 years is participating in the annual Freeport Christmas Bird Count. I was ten years old when I went on my first Christmas count near Houston. Then in 1956, when I was 16, I founded the Freeport CBC. Over the years, that count grew into the most successful CBC in the United States. Through the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties, Freeport usually tallied more species than any ot...
VENTFLASH #95
Victor Emanuel: Nov 25, 08
November 25, 2008Dear friends:I was on a ship off the coast of Panama when the news reached me that my old friend Peter Matthiessen had been awarded the National Book Award for his novel, Shadow Country. Peter is evidently the only writer to have ever received this prestigious award for both a non-fiction book, The Snow Leopard, and a work of fiction.The news evoked memories of an afternoon in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas in April 1976. It was the first VENT tour Peter co-led wi...
VENTFLASH #94
Victor Emanuel: Nov 04, 08
November 4, 2008Dear Friends:October is the beginning of our tour year. Even though the month just ended, we have already received wonderful tour reports from our leaders. Highlights on our Barranca del Cobre tour included an unprecedented 10 Eared Quetzals and sightings of the rare Aztec Thrush. Our Southeast Brazil tour recorded over 400 species. Almost 150 of those birds were regional endemics (birds found only in Brazil or nearby Argentina or Paraguay). The number one highlight from the f...
VENTFLASH #93
Victor Emanuel: Oct 22, 08
Dear Friends:In mid-September I traveled to Racine, Wisconsin to attend an event sponsored by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology that included a showing of Lord God Bird. This film describes the search for the last known Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the 1930s, as well as the more recent searches in Arkansas and Florida. The most moving parts of the film were the footage taken by Arthur Allen of a pair of Ivory-bills at a nest in the Singer Tract in northeast Louisiana in l935, and the foota...
VENTFLASH #92
Victor Emanuel: Sep 08, 08
Dear Friends,With September already upon us, I have been reflecting on all the great trips VENT operated not only this summer, but throughout this past year as well. Our tour year does not parallel the calendar year, but runs from October 1 through the end of the following September. The year that will end on September 30th has been one of the most successful in our company's 32-year history. We again offered more than 150 tours to destinations all over the world. In addition to operating...
VENTFLASH #91
Victor Emanuel: Jul 17, 08
Dear Friends:After a highly eventful spring season that included our first ever Austin, Texas Birding and Nature Festival; successful birds & history cruises to Sicily and Scotland; and outstanding tours to Arizona, Point Pelee, the Smoky Mountains, and New Mexico, we are now well into our summer tour schedule. Our June tours to Minnesota & North Dakota, Alaska, and Churchill & Southern Manitoba all had to contend with unusually rainy, cool weather, but in all cases, the tour lead...
VENTFLASH #90
Apr 09, 08
Dear Friends: I recently returned from our Grand Southern India Train Odyssey. It was everything I had hoped it would be: great birds and mammals, wonderful cultural sites, and several marvelous days traveling across the Deccan Plateau on a lovely train. One of the highlights was our time at the Nagarhole National Park where everyone saw Asian elephants and where some of the group saw wild dogs, a leopard, and two tigers. I have made six previous trips to other parts of India, but this was ...
VENTFLASH #88
Dec 12, 07
Dear Friends:I've just returned from another marvelous trip to Madagascar. We saw lots of lemurs, birds, chameleons, and other fascinating creatures. We had a wonderful and enthusiastic group of participants, with people from England, Canada, and various parts of the United States. Most had been on many previous VENT trips. Every trip I've made over the past 30 years has been such a great pleasure because it has given me the opportunity to share great birds and nature with such fine p...
VENTFLASH #87
Nov 08, 07
Dear Friends:In the last edition of VENTFLASH, I told you of my desire to occasionally highlight several less-known tours or regions of the world that I know you would enjoy hearing about. The tours or regions I speak of are special in that they tend to receive little promotion, yet offer some of the finest travel experiences in our entire repertoire of tours. Most recently you learned of Venezuela. In this edition I want to tell you about two special European tours we will run in 2008: Winte...
VENTFLASH #86
Oct 15, 07
Dear Friends:Every day I come to work I am reminded of all the marvelous destinations to which VENT operates nature tours. I am proud that we offer more than 150 tours worldwide annually. Because all the places we visit are so special, I wish I could share with you my feelings about every one of our tours. Unfortunately time is limited and it just isn't possible. But every so often I like to focus attention on a particular tour or region that I feel you would enjoy reading about. Over the nex...
VENTFLASH #85
Sep 26, 07
Dear Friends:As expected, VENT's summer season ended with a bang. For over 15 years we have offered tours in late summer to three of the most exciting destinations in the world for birds and nature: the Manu region in southeast Peru, Papua New Guinea, and Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia. These tours are always successful, but this summer they did exceptionally well. In August we operated three outstanding North American tours to California, Arizona, and Grand Manan, an island off New Brunswick,...
VENTFLASH #84
Aug 11, 07
August 11,2007Dear Friends:We are having a great summer. I have been receiving many wonderful, tantalizing reports from VENT tours to all parts of the world. Most recently, Barry Zimmer told me his Summer Big Bend tour was an outstanding success. David Bishop said the same thing about his Borneo tour. The Big Bend tour found all the special birds of that marvelous region: Gray Vireo, Lucifer Hummingbird, Colima Warbler, and the most difficult of all?Montezuma Quail. For years, participants on...
VENTFLASH #83
Jul 06, 07
Dear Friends:As spring slips into a very lush summer here in Austin, I am reflecting on what a wonderful year VENT is having. We continue to conduct some of the best birding tours in the world as well as cruises and other special departures. We have a wonderful following and have groups composed of people with whom it is delightful to share birds and nature. In the past two months alone we have conducted tours in places as diverse as Arizona, China, Churchill, Montana, Venezuela, Japan, Scotl...
VENTFLASH #82
May 16, 07
Dear Friends:As being out in nature is such an important part of my life, I am continually thrilled to know that we have tours operating in so many diverse corners of the world. All of our tours offer opportunities to experience some of the planet's most fascinating and beautiful natural history spectacles. I wanted to share with you a report written by David Bishop about our recently completed Bhutan tour, in which he beautifully captures the thrill of a close encounter with Indian wild dogs...
VENTFLASH #81
May 02, 07
Dear friends:This spring has been a special one for me in Texas. I have enjoyed several visits to my beach house on the Upper Texas Coast and have witnessed the peak of spring migration at High Island, one of the most wonderful birding locations in North America. I try to spend time here every April as the surge of millions of songbirds migrating north to their breeding grounds offers the chance to feel the vibrancy of life. Furthermore, I love the spectacle of wildflowers, and in Austin, whe...
VENTFLASH #80
Mar 14, 07
ATTU ALERTMarch 14, 2007Dear friends:Unless 60 people sign up by April 1, 2007 for our September 13-30, 2008 ATTU trip, it will have to be cancelled. We cannot hold our reservation for the ship after that date without sufficient signups. Those who sign up by April 1 will receive a discount of $500.In September 2006 we conducted the first ship-based Attu trip. It was a tremendous success. I regard it as one of the top five trips of my life. The sights are still fresh in my mind: a pod of ...
VENTFLASH #79
Feb 22, 07
Dear friends:As I write this, I am preparing to co-lead our Grand Belize tour with Barry Zimmer and enjoy another visit to the incomparable Chan Chich Lodge. The combination of spacious individual cabanas, a lovely dining room with excellent food and superb service, an extensive and well-maintained trail system, wonderful Mayan ruins, unspoiled protected forest, and, of course, great birding, makes Chan Chich Lodge one of the top ten lodges in the world. We are going to have a marvelous trip....
VENTFLASH #78
Jan 18, 07
Dear friends:We are delighted to be starting 2007 with excellent prospects ahead. VENT participants rang in the New Year in Panama with Steve Hilty, in Venezuela with Jeri Langham and David Ascanio, in South Texas with Kim Eckert, in Cambodia with Susan Myers and Dion Hobcroft, and in Antarctica with Brian Patteson, and Pete and Linda Dunne. Imagine the variety of birds seen on VENT tours on New Year's Day.In this issue:Attu Cruise 2008Winter getawaysComments from participants on recent tours...
VENTFLASH #77
Dec 11, 06
In this issue:Arizona Winter Birding FestivalCalifornia and ArizonaEcuadorAmazon River CruiseWinter Washington and British ColumbiaClassic IndiaShort West MexicoEl TriunfoSpace availableVictor's visit with Peter and Maria MatthiessenLetters from young birdersDear friends:The fall season started auspiciously for VENT with Attu and Jungle Rivers trips. It has continued to be a very good fall for us. We have had an excellent response to our winter tour program. I wanted to call your attention to...
VENTFLASH #76
Oct 31, 06
Dear friends:I?m just back from our incredibly successful Jungle Rivers Cruise. In the long history of VENT we've never had two events so close together in time, so different, and so successful as our September Attu Cruise and our October Jungle Rivers Cruise. Both had superb leadership teams and a wonderful group of participants. Both visited areas (Attu and the Orinoco Delta) that are accessible only by ship. On the Attu trip we saw a bird (the Yellow-browed Warbler) that had previously bee...
