The ABA Board of Directors is delighted to share its 2024 recipients of the ABA Awards.

The ABA Awards Committee encourages all ABA members to familiarize themselves with the many accomplishments of its awardees.

Amar Ayyash

The ABA Robert Ridgway Award for Outstanding Ornithological Publications

Amar Ayyash says that he was looking at gulls for three years before he started birding. That should have been a clue as to where his life was headed.

A few years later, he took on managing the Illinois Ornithological Society’s sellout winter event, the “Gull Frolic”—a day spent at an Illinois harbor in the dead of winter studying gulls from the comfort of a yacht club.

A mathematician by trade, Amar applied his quantitative skills to analyzing the gulls that increasingly became an obsession. Twelve years later, he came to the realization that the field guides and other references he had been using just weren’t cutting it. He needed more, in-depth, but also digestible ways to understand the bewildering array of plumages and other challenges that the Laridae present.

“So I thought, why not compile all the information I want in a gull book and write a gull book?”

And Amar Ayyash did just that. Traveling the world—photographing and studying birds like Slaty-backed Gulls in Japan and Kelp Gulls in South America—Amar created a guide covering 36 species and illustrated with nearly 2,000 images, it’s useful both to birders wanting to understand Ring-billed Gull plumages and to those hoping to pick out a vagrant.

The Gull Guide (Princeton University Press, 2024) has received high praise from the ABA birding community, and from birders across the oceans. Almost an immediate sellout, this guide is in its second printing only months after being released.

-Greg Neise

Ned Brinkley (posthumously)

The Ludlow Griscom Award for Outstanding Contributions in Regional Ornithology

Any meeting with Ned Brinkley was a robust event. Whether a chance encounter at a coastal Virginia seawatch spot, a day at-sea on a pelagic, or even just a written exchange regarding birds of interest, Ned made an impression. Between the nuggets of knowledge he ladled out in the course of conversation, he would interject outlandish bombs meant to trigger a smirk.

Birders who subscribed to North American Birds magazine, the ABA’s Journal of Ornithological Record, came to know Ned well. Ned also edited “The Gold Book”, Virginia’s BirdLife: An Annotated Checklist. Being an editor is often a thankless job, but that suited Ned just fine. He reaped his reward by resting for over a decade at the nexus of the New World’s best and brightest birders. Directing traffic from his desk as editor of NAB meant he could learn and share at warp speed. During his tenure as editor, perhaps no one in the world fostered and wielded such a rich network of ornithological knowledge. His findings were distilled often via The Changing of the Seasons column, but he’d hide Easter Eggs throughout the magazine. Seabirds, weather, and climatic change were steady themes in all his works.

Given how Ned so pushed the boundaries of birding in the state of Virginia, offshore of there, and also out across the pelagic waters of the Mid-Atlantic, the meeting of Ned with ABA’s Ludlow Griscom Award is indeed organic. With a rare hunger, he pursued spots on the map and obscure birds that his colleagues had never even heard of before. Well-studied birders from the ABA Area suddenly found themselves considering birds like Bermuda Petrel, Fea’s Petrel, Zino’s Petrel, Trindade Petrel, Cape Verde Shearwater, Swinhoe’s Storm-Petrel, and others. Ned introduced these birds and provided blue prints for how we might see them. Eventually while working with one of his best friends, Brian Patteson, they actually not only documented these birds but helped to show them to countless other birders from around the world.

Thanks to Ned Brinkley, what were once not even figments transformed to fixtures for passionate birders. His heroic writing on storm events and how weather systems drive and affect seabirds were much anticipated and devoured by the devout. He set the stage for much of what we now hold true for this most romantic group of birds. He put his heart into these birds and they rewarded him again and again. We owe them a debt for what Ned gave to us.

– George Armistead

Christian Cooper

The Betty Petersen Award for Conservation and Community

Christian Cooper has become a leading voice for inclusion and community in the birding world, having discovered birding at an early age growing up on Long Island, NY. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Better Living Through Birding, an unabashed confession of his love of birds and birding, and he is an enthusiastic advocate for bringing others into the flock. He graduated from Harvard University, serving as president of the Harvard Ornithological Club. He is currently a vice president of NYC Bird Alliance, where he advocates for greater, safer access to green spaces for all, with a focus on outreach to youth in underserved communities.

Christian has also been an effective proponent for changing those eponymous bird names that might deter people from taking up our beloved pastime. As the host and executive producer of the National Geographic TV series, Extraordinary Birder, Christian introduced birds and bird conservation to an immense new audience. Christian Cooper exemplifies Betty Petersen’s commitment to bring birding  and the conservation of birds to everyone.

– Wayne Klockner

Julie Davis

The ABA Claudia Wilds Award for Distinguished Service

I first became acquainted with Julie Davis during my interview for the position of Executive Director of the ABA – Julie was chair of the Board then. She has been immensely helpful with my orientation to all things ABA and was a positive force leading the Board early in my ABA tenure. Julie, a resident of Pawley’s Island, SC, has been an ABA Board member since 2017 and served as acting executive director for almost a year during her terms.

As acting ED, Julie helped guide the ABA through a leadership transition while ensuring the continuation of the products and services ABA members and the birding community look forward to. I’m grateful for Julie’s attention and thoughtful consideration, which has contributed to ABA’s current strength and promising growth.

– Wayne Klockner

Mary Gustafson (posthumously)

The Chandler Robbins Award for Education and Conservation

Almost two years ago, the ABA family lost a dedicated and productive member when Mary Gustafson left this plane of existence. Mary was many things to many people in the birding world, but one constant was her dedication to lifting others up.

Originally from Ohio, Mary later lived in Maryland and eventually moved herself and her beloved horse to Mission, Texas. While there, she worked for the Texas state park system, coordinated international conservation initiatives, and served as the field trip coordinator for the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival. In the last of those endeavors, Mary was instrumental in trying as hard as she could to bring a new and diverse cadre people to guide at the festival. She made a particular effort to recruit women, non-binary and trans people, people of color, and Latin Americans, and to say that she changed the face of the festival would be an understatement.

For ABA, Mary volunteered her time as Photo Editor and Technical Reviewer for North American Birds. For eBird, she was the volunteer reviewer for southern Texas, where she was also the volunteer director of the local rare bird alert. And in addition, Mary was well known for taking young birders under her wing. Volunteering to help others ran deep in her DNA. You can read in Mary’s own words why she took this mentoring role so seriously in Issue 2 of The Fledgling, ABA’s magazine produced by and for young birders. About mentoring, she concluded by saying, “[It] gives me joy. Bird joyously, bird responsibly, bird generously. And repeat.”

For a more comprehensive celebration of Mary’s life, be sure to read the article about her in an upcoming 2025 issue of Birding.

– Michael L. P. Retter

Peter Kaestner

The ABA Roger Tory Peterson Lifetime Achievement Award (“The Tropicbird”)

Peter Kaestner is a living legend in the birding world. On February 9, 2024, Peter Kaestner saw an Orange-tufted Spiderhunter in the Philippines, and thus wrote his way into the record books, becoming the first person to have seen 10,000 bird species in the world.

As he pursued this monumental achievement over the course of his life, Peter found the time and energy to accomplish many other feats. He served in the U.S. Foreign Service as a diplomat for 36 years, work which sometimes affected bird conservation, for instance when he helped renegotiate the U.S.–Canada Migratory Bird Treaty. Peter retired at the rank of minister-counselor, the equivalent of a two-star general.

Since retiring, Peter has continued to support bird conservation efforts globally, especially in Colombia, where he has consulted with the government to help develop bird tourism and worked with nonprofit organizations like the American Bird Conservancy to protect land. Peter discovered the Cundinamarca Antpitta, Grallaria kaestneri. Peter has also found time to generate compelling writing for Birding, providing an interview, writing an article about the final steps of his quest to reach 10,000 birds, and reviewing field guides from around the world.

It should perhaps be no surprise that a successful career diplomat would be such an outstanding ambassador for birding. The birding world could hardly ask for a better representative.

– Frank Izaguirre

Tom Johnson (posthumously)

The ABA Roger Tory Peterson Lifetime Achievement Award (“The Tropicbird”)

Tom Johnson, one of the most renowned birders of the current era, died suddenly and unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism at his home in Cape May, New Jersey, on Sun. morning, July 23, 2023. He was 35 and engaged to Melissa Roach. Tom, a graduate of Cornell University, came up through the ABA’s  young birder programs; he went on to make prolific contributions to the ABA and to the birding community more generally.

At the time of his death, he was a Tour Leader with Field Guides, Inc. Tom was especially praised for his photography, capturing birds exactly as they are; many considered him to be the greatest photographer of birds in flight. Tom pioneered new techniques for thermal imaging of birds at night, and he was an expert at avian status & distribution. Despite his youth, he was already acclaimed as one of the most expert field birders of all time.

Tom was universally admired for his good will and graciousness to all. He went out of his way to lift up and encourage beginners—and he could also hold court with world-famous experts twice his age. In his broad and deep engagement of the birding community, Tom touched the lives of literally thousands of nature enthusiasts around the ABA Area and around the world.

—Ted Floyd & Ioana Seritan

Brian Patteson

The Ludlow Griscom Award for Outstanding Contributions in Regional Ornithology

A native of Virginia, Captain Brian Patteson has been organizing pelagic birding trips since 1986, eventually moving full-time to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1995. A complete list of his contributions to our knowledge of seabird biology, distribution and identification would fill a book and, indeed, has been featured in many books. Thousands of birders have seen their first Black-capped Petrels and Band-rumped Storm-Petrels on his trips, but, through the 1980’s, sightings of those species were quite rare. Brian’s efforts added greatly to our understanding of their timing and distribution out in the deeper waters, and both species are seen on most trips in the warmer months. Brian photographed the first Bermuda Petrel ever recorded away from Bermuda in 1996 and subsequently co-authored a landmark 1998 article in Birding on identification criteria for that species. He has documented numerous astounding rarities, such as Yellow-nosed and Black-browed Albatross, Swinhoe’s Storm-Petrel, Black-bellied Storm-Petrel, Tahiti Petrel, Cape Verde Shearwater, and the ABA’s only record of Zino’s Petrel. Species like Bermuda Petrel, Fea’s Petrel, Trindade Petrel, and European Storm-Petrel were formerly considered mega rarities that, through Brian’s work, we now know to be regular in the ABA area in small numbers.  His contributions to field identification of Cory’s and Scopoli’s Shearwater, which his trips have documented and studied for more than twenty years, enabled many ABA members to add an armchair lifer following the recent split.

In 2006, he acquired his own boat, which significantly changed the way people are able to experience many of these species, and it also provided further research and educational opportunities. He captained the effort to capture and tag the first Black-capped Petrel at sea aboard the Stormy Petrel II, a milestone that has further advanced knowledge of that species’ distribution; that work will continue in 2025.

In addition to his fieldwork, Patteson has played a crucial role in educating people about seabirds and their offshore ecosystems. His ability to let people experience these birds firsthand has been transformative, earning him and business partner, co-captain, and marine biologist Kate Sutherland a reputation as some of the best pelagic operators in the world. His dedication and expertise have made a lasting impact on ornithology and marine biology, fostering greater appreciation and knowledge of these vital ecosystems.

– Chris Sloan

More information about the ABA Awards can be found here >>