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David Ascanio, a Venezuelan birder and naturalist, has spent the last 22 years guiding birding tours throughout his native country, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Guyana, northern Peru, western Ecuador, and Panama. He is especially interested in bird vocalizations, and has a private library containing sounds of more than 70% of all the birds of Venezuela, including some which are the only ones known to science. David speaks excellent English and combines superb birding skills with an astonish...
David Bishop loves his vocation and cannot imagine anything better than exploring wild and beautiful places in Asia and the Pacific in the company of friends and clients. He has spent much of the past 33 years studying the birds and natural history of the Oriental region, in addition to New Guinea and the Southwest Pacific. David was once a police officer amid the streets of London's West End, but has emerged as an acknowledged authority on the birds of these exotic regions. His enthusias...
Kim Eckert, with over 40 years of birding experience throughout the U.S. and Canada, has now been guiding birders or teaching bird identification classes for more than 25 of those years. Since the 1980s, he has annually led VENT tours to Newfoundland, Churchill, various locations in the Great Lakes and Great Plains, and to Texas—a favorite and frequent winter destination. He has authored four editions of A Birder’s Guide to Minnesota, and has written numerous articles, notes, and ...
Victor Emanuel started birding in Texas 60 years ago at the age of eight. His travels have taken him to all the continents, with his areas of concentration being Texas, Arizona, Mexico, Panama, and Peru. He is the founder and compiler for 50 years of the record-breaking Freeport Christmas Bird Count, and served a term as president of the Texas Ornithological Society. Birds and natural history have been a major focus throughout his life. He derives great pleasure from seeing and hearing birds,...
Steve Hilty is the senior author of A Guide to the Birds of Colombia, and the recently published Birds of Venezuela, both by Princeton University Press. Other credits include Birds of Tropical America, A watcher's introduction to behavior, breeding and diversity, which has just been republished by the University of Texas Press. He has also written a number of scientific papers on birds and plants, and is presently preparing the text and species accounts for the tanagers for a forthcoming ...
Kenn Kaufman is an author, artist, teacher, traveler, and naturalist who has focused on birds since the age of six. Two of his books, A Field Guide to Advanced Birding and Lives of North American Birds, are now considered standard references for birders. Kingbird Highway has been hailed as "one of the best books ever written about birding." In 2000, Houghton Mifflin Company launched Kenn's new field guide series, Kaufman Focus Guides, with a brand new guide to all North American...
Barry Lyon's passion for the outdoors and birding has its roots in his childhood where he grew up in southern California. Through his early and teenage years his developing interests were nurtured by summertime camping trips to southern Arizona and road trips throughout the American West. He attended three VENT/ABA youth birding camps, which would ultimately pave the way for his future involvement with VENT. While in college, Barry studied history and political science, with an emphasis o...
Peter Matthiessen is one of America's leading nature writers and novelists. His adventures have led him around the world, from the Arctic to Nepal and South America. Peter has co-led VENT tours to Namibia and Botswana, Tanzania, Churchill, India and Bhutan, Texas, Peru, the Dry Tortugas, and Mexico. Among the awards he has received are the Brandeis Award, the John Burroughs Medal, the John Steinbeck Award, the Edith Wharton Award, the Orion-John Hay Award, the Society of Conservation Biol...
Michael O'Brien is a freelance artist, author, and environmental consultant living in Cape May, New Jersey. He has traveled extensively throughout North and Central America and has a passionate interest in migration, bird vocalizations, and field identification. At home in Cape May, Michael serves as an Associate Naturalist with Cape May Bird Observatory for whom he conducts numerous workshops, writes a monthly ID column and photo quiz (see www.birdcapemay.org), and, for many years, condu...
Robert Ridgely has made an enormous contribution to Neotropical ornithology. He is the author, with John Gwynne, of A Guide to the Birds of Panama, still one of the finest field guides ever published. During the last three decades he has traveled to virtually every part of South America, and has become recognized as one of the top experts on South American birds. In the early 1980s, he and his friend, Guy Tudor, began the monumental task of producing a series of volumes covering all the birds...
Peter Roberts is based in Britain, lives in the north of Scotland, and has been a keen naturalist since childhood in London. While birds remain his main interest, close contenders include whale-watching, the big game animals of Africa, snorkeling, and the study of insects. A varied, lifelong career has included conservation and wildlife-related work from nature reserve management and teaching wildlife field courses to ornithological survey and research, environmental consultancy, and work for...
Bob Sundstrom has led VENT tours since 1989 to destinations including Hawaii, Mexico, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Iceland, Papua New Guinea, the Southwest Pacific islands, Antarctica, the Bering Sea, and many destinations throughout North America. Bob takes a strong interest in both the natural and cultural settings of his tours. He earned his doctorate at the University of Washington. Bob and his wife Sally live in the rural Scatter Creek Valley south of Olympia, Washington. Bob lived in Se...
Andrew Whittaker has been based in Amazonian Brazil for the last 21 years. Andy's passion for birding and natural history started at the early age of seven in the UK. For the past 26 years Andy has worked with birds, traveling around the world studying bird migration in Canada, Israel, Borneo, and the UK. Working in the Brazilian rainforest for the Smithsonian Institution has made Andy an authority on Amazonian birds and the region's natural history, and he has authored many technical...
David Wolf is a senior member of the VENT staff and one of our most experienced tour leaders. After birding the U.S. and Mexico for over a decade, an interest in the mammals of Africa led him to Kenya in 1975, where he spent over a year studying the birds and other wildlife of the African continent. Soon after his return to Texas he began leading Rockport Wildlife Weekends for VENT, at that time a new company, and he hasn't looked back since. In addition to Africa, David has extensive bir...
Louise Zemaitis is an artist and naturalist living in Cape May, New Jersey. She is a popular field trip leader in Cape May where she leads bird and butterfly walks and teaches birding workshops as an Associate Naturalist with Cape May Bird Observatory. Louise is also compiler of the Cape May Christmas Bird Count, coordinator of the Monarch Monitoring Project in Cape May, and curator of the Cape May Bird Observatory Art Gallery. An honors graduate at Temple University's Tyler School of Art...
Barry Zimmer has been birding since the age of eight. His main areas of expertise lie in North and Central America, but his travels have taken him throughout much of the world, including such exotic locales as Japan, Russia, Madagascar, Africa, and New Zealand. Barry is a longtime member of the New Mexico Bird Records Committee, and served on the Texas Bird Records Committee for 12 years. He has co-authored three books: Birds of the Trans-Pecos, A Birder's Guide to the Rio Grande Valley, ...
Kevin Zimmer has authored three books and numerous papers dealing with field identification and bird-finding in North America. His book, Birding in the American West: A Handbook, deals with finding and identifying birds in the western United States. Living in Alaska contributed to his affection for the Far North, where he has anchored VENT's tour program since 1986. For the past 18 years he has concentrated his attention on the Neotropics, particularly on Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru,...