Photo credit: Dana Nelson, Cattail Marsh, December 18, 2018
You are welcome to attend monthly meetings, featuring speakers on birding and natural history topics, and including a delicious member-provided evening meal -- with desserts! Our monthly field trips are fun and educational, and focus on locations along the coast, marshes, prairies, and forests of the area.
Membership Meeting
Thursday April 18, 2024 7:00 p.m.
Garden Center, Tyrrell Park, Beaumont
Making Flycatcher Identification Accessible to All
Cin-Ty Lee
Cin-Ty Lee spends much of his spare time following, painting, photographing and recording birds. Together with Andrew Birch, he has written numerous articles and books on the field identification of birds, most recently the Field Guide to North American Flycatchers – Empidonax and Pewees in the Princeton series. A second volume covering the kingbirds and Myiarchus Flycatchers is scheduled for publication on April 9. He will sign copies of these books but will not have any available for sale at the meeting, so you will have to purchase directly from Princeton University Press, or Amazon or other booksellers. He has also published articles on Arctic and Pacific Loons, female orioles and dowitchers among other identification challenges.
Cin-Ty Lee was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US with his family. He has a B.A. in geology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in geochemistry from Harvard University. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of Rice University in 2002, and is currently the Harry Carothers Wiess Professor of Geology in the Department of Geology, Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
We plan to have the doors open no later than 6:00 p.m., the meeting will start at 7:00 p.m. sharp.
Field trip to Sabine Woods.
Saturday April 20, 2024.
This trip will look for Neotropical migrants at the height of spring migration. We will assemble at Sabine Woods at 7:30 a.m. In most years, the GTAS group has divided into two or more parties to keep the number of birders with each leader as small as possible. (You should be able to find a group if you are unable to be there quite that early, but there are likely to be other organized groups in the Woods on this Saturday.)
We have portable toilets available at the entrance during spring migration, but even with an increased number this year, there may not be as much capacity on April weekends as would be ideal!
This trip involves relatively easy walking on the trails at Sabine Woods to look for migrant songbirds, although another option is to sit at one of the five water features (two of them new this year and wait for the birds to come to you. The trails may be muddy and slippery if it has rained in the prior day or two. Armadillos and feral pigs have been very active, so there will be holes to avoid! There is a $10 sanctuary pass donation at Sabine Woods for those who are not members of Golden Triangle Audubon or TOS.