Archive
2022 was our first annual Kansas Lek Treks Festival. We had 90 attendees from 25 different states and one international visitor. Despite the windy weather, everyone saw prairie-chickens and enjoyed exploring northwestern Kansas.
2023 Banquet Speaker: Tiffany Kersten, Nature Ninja Birding Tours
Birdie Big Year: Elevating Women Birders
Tiffany Kersten didn't set out to do a big year, but after a series of unanticipated and serendipitous events, she suddenly found herself amidst one. As a sexual assault survivor, she spent 2021 traveling to all corners of the Lower 48 States, tallying birds and gifting personal safety alarms to women she met along the way. Her goal was to see 700 species, and to raise awareness of women's safety in the outdoors. She ended up surpassing her goal and setting a new Lower 48 Big Year record of 726. In her presentation, Tiffany will lead us through the fear, empowerment, struggles and healing that all played vital roles in the personal growth she experienced on this wild adventure.
Tiffany Kersten is a Wisconsin native, turned Texan by way of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Hawaii. She holds a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology from Northland College, and has spent over a decade as an environmental educator, teaching raptor identification and migration with the Cape May Bird Observatory, monitoring shorebirds on Cape Cod, banding Honeycreepers in Hawaii, and finally landing in South Texas where she first worked at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, then Quinta Mazatlan World Birding Center, and managed the McAllen Nature Center, before completing a Lower 48 States Big Year in 2021, and founding her own bird guiding company, Nature Ninja Birding Tours. She guides primarily in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, but can occasionally be found guiding elsewhere!
2022 Banquet Speaker: Nate Swick, Host of the American Birding Podcast
Birding for Life: How Birding Can Make you a Better Person
We've all heard about birding as a lifetime activity, a fun and rewarding way to stay healthy. But there's more to birding than just that. Birding challenges us not only physically, but mentally. It encourages behavior that helps us make good decisions and it rewards critical thinking. And it allows us to be present of our surroundings and engaged with the world around us, often without even realizing it. The ABA's Nate Swick will make the case that there's no better activity than birding to make you a better person.
Nate Swick is the Digital Communications manager for the ABA and the host of the ABA's American Birding Podcast. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Danielle, and two young children. He is the author of A Beginner's Guide to Birding (Page Street, 2018) and The ABA Field Guide to Birds of the Carolinas (Scott & Nix, 2019). He occasionally serves as the chair of the North Carolina Bird Records Committee and will be trying to get 100 species in all of North Carolina's 100 counties for the rest of his natural life.