The Fall Meeting is Oct 11 – 13, to be held in the Shelby Center at DI Sealab. It will follow our usual format of Social hour and workshop with our guest speaker Friday night, social half hour then banquet with guest speaker keynote Saturday night and final compilation at the Goat Trees noon on Sunday. Outings will be offered Friday and Saturday morning (TBA) and depending on bird activity Sunday morning. Full details will appear in our Fall Newsletter and here.
Our Guest Speaker is Dr Cin-Ty Lee. Dr Lee is a geologist at Rice University in Texas, but also has an interest in birds, operating a series of monitoring stations to track migratory birds. Dr Lee is best known outside the academic world for his two recent books on Flycatcher identification, North American Flycatchers: Empidonax and pewees published in 2023 and North American Flycatchers: Kingbirds and Myiarchus published in 2024. This meeting will be a great opportunity to hone your flycatcher ID skills both at the workshop and the keynote talk. Dr Lee will also be co-leading one of our Saturday morning field trips where his additional skills in Sparrow and Shorebird ID may come in handy.
Looking down the road we are going a bit further afield, to the Florida Panhandle (which is part of the AOS area) and St Marks NWR, for our January 24-26, 2025 winter meeting. It has been quite a while since AOS has met there and it is time to return to this incredibly birdy and beautiful area. Our base will be nearby Crawfordville, which is close to Wakulla Springs, which we’ll visit via a boat ride. Along with its natural beauty Wakulla is famous for being the location of the 1954 horror movie Creature from the Black Lagoon! More information will be posted here and full information in the Winter newsletter and here.