North American Birds

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No stranger to ABA publications, Amy Davis has served as Sightings department editor at Birding and technical reviewer at Birder’s Guide. She was also photo editor for Pennsylvania Birds. Amy loves citizen science and volunteered extensively for breeding bird atlases in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia. She resides in Forked River, NJ, and recently broke her home county’s big year record. When she’s not birding the Barnegat Bay, Amy studies nursing and plays classical piano.

For over 15 years Eric DeFonso has been involved in the birding and conservation community in Colorado. His activities range from volunteer stints with a raptor rehabilitation program and being on the Board of Directors for the Fort Collins Audubon Society to giving presentations to Audubon chapters across the state and guiding field trips for Colorado Field Ornithologists. Eric has an extensive collection of bird sound recordings and now writes a regular column on birding by ear for Colorado Birds. When not obsessing over birds or language, Eric pursues his other career as a licensed massage therapist.

José Ramírez-Garofalo is a researcher and lifelong birder living in Staten Island, New York. His main research interests are the effects of climate change on bird distribution, particularly range expansion via vagrancy. Since 2017, José has also focused his work on the conservation of birds in New York City’s urban greenspaces, where both regionally-rare and at-risk species have begun to establish themselves within the last five years. José has worked for the U.S. National Park Service and the New York City Audubon Society, and he is now an adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York and a Research Associate at the Freshkills Park Alliance.

Kayla Jones is an artist living and working in Richmond, Virginia. She grew up birding with her dad and continued the pastime during her undergraduate career at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work, which currently explores the tension and distance between learning and knowing, is informed heavily by years of studying illustrations, memorizing calls, and staring through binoculars while trying to identify birds. When not birding or working in her studio, Kayla bakes pizzas and watches reality television. She is extremely grateful to her parents for housing her through the pandemic and for being such willing subjects in her baking experiments.

A love of wildlife, wild places and wild people has kept Andrew Keaveney bouncing back and forth. He has worked as a nature interpreter, wildlife technician, bird guide, and conservationist, and along the way has explored a number of volunteer opportunities abroad. Andrew grew up in Ontario, where he’s known to be a twitcher, and he recently surpassed 400 species on his provincial list. When he’s not perusing through his rather impressive bird book collection, you’ll find him out exploring interests in butterflies, in Odonates, and the all-too-time-consuming hobby of mothing. His favorite places to bird are islands and cloudforests.

Joshua Malbin is a birder, writer, and editor who has lived in Brooklyn, New Tork for the better part of two decades. He got serious about learning his birds after being the neophyte fact-checker who let a photo of a Ruddy Duck go through labeled as a scaup in a birding magazine; in 2021 he added Dovekie as his 310th species in the borough. Since those early days in publishing, Joshua has written and edited science pieces about everything from industrial hygiene to nuclear medicine to economics. He has also written two novels set in the aftermath of a civil war over water in the American West.

Though Alex Meilleur was born in France, he is most familiar with the birds of the United States, in particular those of the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and Hawaii. He has also spent considerable time birding in Europe, Chile, and Japan. Alex is a University of Washington graduate and a resident of Seattle, Washington. He works in digital marketing for the outdoor industry, combining his love for birding with his other favorite outdoor activities: skiing, biking, and hiking.

Randi Minetor is the writer behind the recent reboot of Falcon Guides’ birdfinding book series. These include Birding New England (2019), Birding Florida (2021), and the new Best Easy Bird Guides series, which helps new birders identify species in U.S. national parks. She travels the U.S. with her husband, photographer Nic Minetor, in a quest to take photos of every bird species in the country. (So far, they have 415 in stock.) Randi serves on the board of the Rochester Birding Association in New York and volunteers with the New York State Breeding Bird Atlas and Genesee Land Trust.

Alison Világ is a birder, migration counter, and writer who is currently living and working in the Great Lakes region, from where she hails. She has spent the last two years at Whitefish Point Bird Observatory, at the northeasternmost limit of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There, amid a mosaic of cobbled beach, scrappy jack pines, and mercurial waters, she conducts a renowned waterbird count. Alison also heads the communications and outreach programs for WPBO. When she’s not at the Point, Alison is likely indulging her other love: solo canoeing.

If you are also interested in helping edit and publish regional reports, please contact North American Birds editor Michael Retter at mretter@aba.org.