Upcoming Events
Beginner Bird Walk— UCSB Lagoon
Come join us on a bird walk, no experience necessary! One of our leadership members will lead a walk around the Lagoon and help you find, observe, and identify local species of birds.
Monthly General Meeting
Come and meet the club members for our first in-person meeting of Winter Quarter 2022! We will be discussing upcoming events and giving an update on how the camping trip went. You do not have to have previous birding experience or club involvement to join our monthly meetings. We will be gathering at Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration in the Harder South Building 578. Click here for the google maps location.
GCAS-MAPAS Carrizo Plain Camping Trip
Goleta Audubon is partnering with Making Adventure Possible for all Students (MAPAS) for an overnight outdoor and birding adventure! Sign up here if you are interested in joining.
Bird Walk - UCSB Lagoon
We had a total of 19 people show up for this walk which is our highest number so far! Great seeing all the new faces and we hope more folks can come out to future events with us 😁
Bird Walk - Lake Los Carneros
Lovely seeing everyone that was able to make it out again at today’s bird walk😁 As always lots of thanks to our president, Connor, and our programming chair, Linus, this time around for leading the walk!
The Big Sit
This past weekend was The Big Sit, a fun birding event where you go out to any of your favorite birding spots and try to count as many species of birds as you can within a certain radius. Connor and Linus, our president and programming chair, went out to Lake Los Carneros and counted 83 species for the day! They also managed to get some gnarly photos of an osprey, a great blue heron, and a scraggly coyote.
Bird Walk
We'll meet at the North Campus Open Space pavilion and bird around NCOS, Devereux Slough, and Coal Oil Point. These sites are all excellent for migrating shorebirds and waterfowl this time of year. We'll have a couple spotting scopes and a set of binoculars and field guides, too, if anyone needs to borrow some! Please RSVP on the Slack channel (see the Contact page for how to join).
Guest talk: John Garrett
John Garrett is a project assistant at eBird, the worldwide platform for bird observations. John will share how to use eBird, how eBird is used for science and conservation, and what you can learn about birds and their ecology by exploring the data on eBird's website. Google Calendar / Zoom
General Meeting
We’ll discuss recent birding trips, upcoming virtual events, and opportunities to get involved in bird monitoring initiatives for White-tailed Kites and birds in our local creeks. We'll also discuss plans for our annual elections, which will be held by poll next month for the 2021-2022 academic year. Zoom
Jessica Nielson talk- Conservation Specialist at Coal Oil Point Reserve (COPR)
Jessica Nielson will be speaking about her work protecting and conserving birds. COPR is an important wintering and breeding site for the federally threatened Western Snowy Plover. The reserve dedicates a great deal of effort to ensuring the continued health of this imperiled but adorable population. Management strategies range from providing nest defense cages to educating the public via the Snowy Plover Docent program. Tune in to hear more about Jessica’s work and learn how you can get involved! Calendar / Zoom
Santa Barbara Chapter event- The Russian Far East: Birding in a Sea of Sorrow.
Zoom link here. More information on Santa Barbara Chapter’s program.
General Meeting
We’ll discuss a range of topics including ongoing conservation and science projects, early plans for a data-science hackathon, and updates from the bird-window collision working group. Zoom link here.
Mary Whitfield Talk
Join us at 5:30 on April 7th, 2021 on Zoom!
Mary Whitfield on the talk she will be presenting: “The Southern Sierra Research Station is a small non-profit organization headquartered at our research facility in the foothills of California's southern Sierra Nevada, an area unique for its convergence of 5 biological regions and thus a region of high diversity including well over 300 bird species. Our mission is to conduct, promote, facilitate, and disseminate biological research that informs conservation decisions and environmental policy, and contributes towards understanding, sustaining, and conserving natural resources and environmentally challenged species. With a focus on research in the Pacific Southwest through Central America, in collaboration with government, academic, and conservation organizations, we increase scientific knowledge of species in support of our mission, aid in projects to protect and restore endangered species and their habitats and encourage public support and appreciation for conservation of biological diversity. We have a number of ongoing long-term research projects in the Kern River Valley and beyond. These projects include work with Southwestern Willow Flycatchers, Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Tricolored Blackbirds, and Motus (a collaborative automated Radio Telemetry system). In this talk I briefly summarize our research on Willow Flycatchers, Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Tricolored Blackbirds and Motus.”