Birding 101: Build your birding knowledge from the ground up
Registration is now open to Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance members.
Class dates: April 5, 12, 26, and May 3 from 8:00-10:00am CST.
If you love all things nature and want to get to know the birds you'll find in and around Madison, this class is for you. This is a four-part session with both classroom and field-based learning, and geared toward adults. Our goals are to teach you the skills important to identifying bird species, and then practice those skills with a new set of birds each week.
Week 1’s birds will include the most common species, Week 2 will focus on less common and more challenging birds, and Week 3 will culminate in the tricky family of Warblers. The final week will feature a bird walk. This is a fun, interactive, judgement-free learning experience; join us!
Class dates are April 5, 12, 26, and May 3 from 8:00-10:00am CST.
Classes 1-3 (April 5, 12, and 26) will be held at Kromrey Middle School, 7009 Donna Dr, Middleton, right next to the Pheasant Branch Creek Coordior.
Class 4 (May 3) location is TBD.
WHEELCHAIR USE: Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance has one electric-powered wheelchair available for anyone to use for free. You can learn more about it here, and request it in the form when you register.
Or, if you want to use a more rugged, all-terrain, outdoor wheelchair for this field trip, Access Ability Wisconsin offers them for free! To reserve a chair and trailer, visit their website.
Questions? Contact Brenna Marsicek, bmarsicek@swibirds.org or 608-255-2473
Registration is now open to Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance SoWBA members!
Registration is limited to 25 people.
About the Instructors: Chuck Henrikson, Leslie Paynter, and Bob Kendall
Course instructor Chuck Henrikson
Chuck Henrikson was born and raised near Lake Minnetonka, MN. He got a BA in biology at St. Olaf College and an MS and PhD in anatomy at Purdue. After a postdoc, he taught gross anatomy, histology and neuroanatomy at Schools of Veterinary Medicine (Purdue, NCSU and UW-Madison) his whole professional career. After 21 years at UW, he retired in 2009. He was a casual birder before retirement but afterwards really became serious submitting all his sightings to Cornell Lab of Ornithology or eBird. Now he goes birding every day. He now has a streak of checklist submissions to eBird of 2,645 days in a row that started on 3 December 2017. He started leading bird walks in the spring for SoWBA and started year round bird walks on Tuesdays in the UW Arboretum in 2015. In March of 2020, we had to stop the Tuesday bird walks because of Covid so instead, he started writing weekly Arb bird reports. Initially the reports with added photos were emailed to 20-30 birders but as word got out about the reports the number grew and now he emails reports to just over 850 people. He started teaching SoWBA’s Birding 101 class in 2018.
Leslie Paynter is a lifelong Madisonian and a long time member of the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. She retired from Madison Gas and Electric in the fall of 2023 and had the good fortune to meet Chuck and Bob through the Tuesday morning bird walks in the Arboretum. She has always loved birds and remember taking classes in the Arboretum as a child in the 1960s and 1970s. It is just as fun now as it was then although it was a lot quieter when the Beltline Highway was only a two-lane road!
Leslie likes to get out as often as she can to look for birds and she also enjoys drawing them. It is always a great pleasure to talk with others about their observations and experiences with birds. We are lucky to live in a place where there are so many enthusiastic and friendly folks and so many interesting birds!
Cover photo by Kelly Colgan Azar
