Registration is currently closed. Please contact slao@sfbbo.org if you are interested in joining the workshop.

Nothing in birding and ornithology is perhaps as exciting as migration! Throughout the world, birds move, and this has captured our imaginations from ancient times until now. Fortunately, today we have many more tools at our disposal to understand migration and to begin explaining how these little creatures do it. This course is an introduction and summary of bird migration, and it is a way to get to know the identification and biology of a sampling of our local migratory landbirds, focusing on warblers, vireos, tanagers, thrushes and a few others. We will get to enjoy migratory birds, learn about them, and discuss migration itself: how it happens, how they do it, and why they do it. We will follow some of our birds to the south, to find out what they do in winter and where they go to spend the time they are not here with us. We will talk a little bit about the technology that allows us to follow birds in migration and what the future may have in store regarding tracking birds. Before you know it, you may be able to track birds from your very computer and know a tagged migrant is near your house! 

Alvaro Jaramillo is an internationally known ornithologist and expert. Alvaro has a B.S. in Zoology and an M.S. in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Toronto, and also conducted research at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. An expert on the birds of California and North America, he wrote the American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of California and New World Blackbirds. He is also an authority on the birds of Chile, authoring Birds of Chile (2003), collaborating on Chile’s Important Bird Areas program, and helping to identify a new bird species there, Oceanites pincoyae (Pincoya Storm-Petrel). An author and contributor to numerous field guides and popular publications, Alvaro’s passion is not only to understand the biology and natural history of birds, but to enrich other’s enjoyment of birds and further avian conservation and he leads birding trips throughout the world with his company, Alvaro's Adventures. 

Workshop Dates: 

March 16 & 18, 2021

6:00pm – 8:00pm

$100 total per person for both sessions