Brian is a recently retired Optometrist living in Manistee. He has been birding for fifty-three years and was fortunate to both be on the crest of the new field birding in the 1970’s and the now technical/digital media birding revolution of the 2020’s. He is a former member of the Michigan Bird Records Committee, one of the editors of the ABA Birder’s Guide to Michigan, the current eBird reviewer for Northwest Michigan, and bird trip leader for several conservation organizations in Michigan. He enjoys birding in the tropics and has recently returned from birding trips to Brazil and Ecuador. His favorite activity is getting anyone of any age interested in birding by getting them on their “spark” bird.

Michael is an experienced field ornithologist residing in Royal Oak, Michigan. A walking version of Merlin app, Michael has amazing hearing and is skilled in the identification of the songs and call notes of hundreds of North American bird species. A popular field trip leader at the Huron Fringe Birding Festival (Port Elgin, Ontario) and Aldo Leopold Festival (Hessel, Michigan), his outings for over a decade were almost always at capacity. His birding by ear workshops have been attended by various ecological consultants.

Michael has organized and let bird tours in Michigan, Texas, Arizona, and Ontario… In 1989 after he and two Canadian teammates won the E.W. Stearns award in the World Series of Birding in New Jersey, Michael secured the sponsorship of KOWA, The Canadian Team KOWA consistently set records from 1989 to 1996 for the total number of species observed in a 24-hour period by a team based outside of New Jersey.

Michael is Principal and Owner of MEC Environmental Consulting which provides environmental assessment and regulatory compliance services to industry. He conducted hundreds of avian surveys to monitor the effectiveness of bird control measures and to document mortality. In the 1980’s Michael investigated the utilization of urban microhabitat by migrating birds and earlier conducted a study of nocturnal avian migrants colliding with tall buildings in Detroit, Michigan and Rochester, New York.

Terry is a recently retired middle school teacher and West Michigan birder who made a Michigan Big Year run in 2021. On his way to recording a whopping 323 species for the year, he logged an obscene number of miles, had some great adventures, and met many amazing people along the way. His wife Andrea and Terry have dedicated countless hours to developing beginning birders with their “Beaver Island Group” program through Fremont Middle School. Most of Terry’s introductory birding experiences happened on Beaver Island while he was a Central Michigan University student studying at the CMU Biological Station on Beaver in 1989. He then discovered that there were other individuals, groups even, interested in birding. He has maintained life-long relationships with these people. He and Andrea have developed young birders for 20 years with the groups they’ve brought to CMU’s Biological Station and birding events down-state.

Jeff Scofield works for Central Michigan University in the Dept of Biology.  Jeff is a frequent visitor to Beaver Island and has been since taking classes at the CMU Biological Station as both an undergraduate back in the late 80s, earning a B.S. Degree in Biology, and then as a graduate student, where he earned a M.S. Degree working with spiders.  If Jeff sees a board or piece of metal lying on the ground, rest assured that he will flip it over in hopes of finding a snake or two underneath.  In addition, if he’s not looking for snakes and spiders, there’s a good chance you might see him metal detecting or rock hounding on a beach.  But the most likely activity you will see him doing is riding a bicycle around the Island.  Jeff is an avid mountain biker and gravel road biker and has travelled around the country, along with his wife Nancy, in pursuit of fun trails and enjoyable gravel roads.