Meet the Editor of Winging It

Bill Maynard

Bill Maynard at Sacha Tower.

After a childhood family vacation to a dude ranch in Colorado, native Buckeye, Bill Maynard, knew that one day he would return to his favorite state. In college at Miami University (Red Hawks), not the University of Miami (Hurricanes), he learned from ski bums that you could make a living doing what you liked best, in his case, bird-related jobs. Bill combined teaching biology and electives at a private girls' high school near Cleveland, Ohio, with working summers as a seasonal naturalist and research technician for the National Park Service in Virginia (Assateague Island National Seashore), Michigan (Isle Royale NP), Alaska (Kobuk Valley NP and Noatak National Preserve), and Florida (Everglades NP and Big Cypress National Preserve).

Eventually, he moved to Colorado in the '80s and founded a wildlife art gallery and picture-framing business with his sister-in-law, Virginia, who later would become Winging It's second editor. A real bird job, an avian analyst variability research project with Dr. Jared Verner, led Bill to California with its endemic birds; to Mt. Graham, Arizona, surveying for the endangered Mt. Graham red squirrel, and more birds; on to New Mexico, coordinating the statewide search for the endangered Southwest Willow Flycatcher for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish; back to Colorado, as a biologist on a large military reservation, and then on to the American Birding Association, as Field Programs' Manager. After a brief, but birdy retirement, Bill is back.

Now that his Harry Potter reading assignments are complete, Bill's main interests involve learning more about bird taxonomy and vocalizations, the finer points of bird identification, digiscoping, and travel anywhere; but especially to The Bird Continent. Knowing next to nothing about seabirds, Bill hopes to one day go on multi-day pelagics, following ocean wanderers across an unexplored frontier.

Bill is a Colorado Field Ornithologists' Bird Records Committee member, plus he can perform a mean rendition of a Lesser Prairie-Chicken's lek display; thankfully, failing miserably at the female's vocal "bubbling, hooting wamp, wodum, wodum" and other wild clucking, with exaggerated jumps and strutting of the male. Bill's most ambitious plans concern preparations to appear on a popular late-night talk show, performing, neither Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's "Jumpin' Jack", nor "O Mimi Tu Piu Non Torni" from La Boheme; but instead, a raucous rendition of Willow Ptarmigan vocalizations.