Chapter Meeting – November 2021

CHAPTER MEETING

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

7:00 PM

Lions Field House – 270 Elkhorn Road (WI-67), Williams Bay, WI

The meeting is free to attend and will include the following talk:

Wisconsin Winter Birds

By Bill Volkert

Winter is the most demanding season for our wildlife, with short days and cold temperatures. As a result, most of our birds migrate south to escape the season, but for those that remain they have adapted to survive the season.  This is a good time of year to get to know Wisconsin’s birds, since they are easy to observe and easy to learn, because there are relatively few species present.  This presentation will introduce participants to a variety of winter birds, discuss some of their adaptations to winter, and provide hints on how to attract a variety of birds to your backyard.

Bill worked as the naturalist and wildlife educator for Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources at Horicon Marsh for 27 years, where he conducted more than 3,700 education programs for over 220,000 people.  His broad audiences included 66 delegations of scientists from 43 countries who came for professional training.  In his personal time he has traveled widely in search of the world’s birds and the wild places they inhabit.  His travels have taken him throughout Central and South America, across the Canadian Arctic, to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Borneo, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Mongolia. 

Bill and Connie make their home in the northern Kettle Moraine area of east-central Wisconsin.  Here they work together to restore and manage a series of native plant communities on their land, including an oak-hickory forest, a planted prairie community and native plant nursery, and manage various types of wetlands.  On this land, they have now identified more than 650 species of plants and animals, including 207 species of birds.

Bill shares his experiences and understanding of the natural world through lectures, presentations, field trips and the media.  He has been a regular guest on Wisconsin Public Radio for more than 30 years to talk about Wisconsin birds.  He is also working on several writing projects that will give these presentations more permanence and reach an even wider public.