10,000 Birds Beat Writers

Here are all of the amazing 10,000 Birds Beat Writers in alphabetical order by last name. If you don’t see a beat writer you are looking for here they might have left the blog in which case you will find them on the 10,000 Birds Writers Emeritus page. If you scroll down to the bottom of the Beat Writer directory you will see the Beat Writer posting calendar so you know when to look for your favorite 10,000 Birds Beat Writer. Note that everyone does their best to stick to the schedule but occasionally life gets in the way.

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When Faraaz Abdool reached out to Mike and Corey about writing on 10,000 Birds they were keen about the idea: after all, both of them had birded T&T before and loved it! Faraaz’s posts on Birding Trinidad and Tobago and Beyond will appear every-other-Wednesday afternoon.

Faraaz is an internationally published freelance conservation and wildlife photographer/writer who specializes in birds and the issues they face worldwide. He graciously serves on the Trinidad and Tobago Bird Status and Distribution Committee (formerly the Trinidad and Tobago Rare Bird Committee), and leads birding trips on both islands. Faraaz also runs yearly birding and wildlife tours to East Africa.

Although he doesn’t keep a life list, Faraaz has been a keen birder for many years, separating Black and Turkey Vultures at distance as a little boy, skipping class to gaze at Magnificent Frigatebirds as a teenager and quitting his job as an electrical engineer to put all his energy into conservation as an adult.

Faraaz cultivates wildlife consciousness via his words and images, in a last-ditch attempt to reconnect humans with nature and save the world.

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Jason Crotty started at 10,000 Birds with a series of awesome guest posts and signed on as a beat writer in March 2017. His beat is General Birding and the Law.

Jason Crotty is a birder, lawyer, and occasional writer currently living in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter. A Bay Area native, he started birding while working at a large law firm in San Francisco, but birds less frequently now that there’s a toddler around so he writes instead. He is particularly interested in the intersection of law and birding (especially the Endangered Species Act), other bird-related federal litigation, and the impact of federal public lands. He has also written about birding in Puerto Rico, which he believes is criminally underappreciated as a destination for birders. Jason’s writing has also appeared in BirdWatching, Birding, and Birder’s Guide, both online and in print.

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Luca Feuerriegel approached me responding to my embarrassing campaign looking for new writers – and I am very happy to have him here. Not only because he writes well but also because he substantially lowers the average age of our writers …

Family holidays to nature reserves and the abundance of nature books including bird guides at home paved the way for Luca Feuerriegel to be a committed birder by the time he was in his early teens. Growing up in Namibia, South Africa, and Sri Lanka provided the perfect setting for this interest. Luca recently completed his BSc in the Netherlands and currently spends his time working (and birding!) before starting his MSc.

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Mark Gamin contributes book reviews to 10,000 Birds – we are happy to have him here.

Mark Gamin is a lawyer, writer, and editor. He became a birder at Antioch College, where he studied with the ornithologist Jim Howell, and first saw the secretive Virginia Rail. Physically Mark is a resident in Cleveland, but in his mind, he is often at his small farm in Appalachian Ohio, on the very edge of civilization.

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Paul Lewis reached out to us with some guest posts about birding in Mexico and we liked them so much we invited him to become a beat writer!

Paul Lewis moved from California to Mexico 36 years ago. He lived first in Mexicali, and now in the historic city of Morelia (about halfway between Guadalajara and Mexico City), where he and his wife pastor a small church. He is the author of an internationally distributed book in Spanish about family finances and has recorded four albums in Spanish of his own songs. But every Monday, he explores the wonderful habitats and birds found within an hour of his house, in sites which go from 3,000 to 10,000 feet of altitude.

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Angela Minor offered to write for 10,000 Birds despite already having quite a few writing and editing credits to her name. (We don’t know why either!) She wanted to write about visiting parks and political-based attacks on those parks but “Conservation Politics and Park Destinations” wasn’t quite the catchy title we felt was needed for her beat. Fortunately, Angela came up with Park Watch both because she’ll be doing lots of birding in parks and because she will be watching over parks, so to speak. It’s perfect!

Angela has lived, traveled, and birded across the southern US to the Rocky Mountains, in Alaska and the Caribbean, and seven countries in Europe. Freelance travel writer is her third career iteration, following teacher and small business owner. She currently writes for several travel publications including Blue Ridge Country, Smoky Mountain Living, and cruise sites; serves as a Field Editor with Birds & Blooms; and authors the state park birding series for Bird Watcher’s Digest.

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Clare Morton is familiar to those of you who read her guest posts here on 10,000 Birds about the shorebirds that she monitors and protects at Roebuck Bay in Broome, the world-famous shorebird site in Australia, before she became a beat writer.

Clare and her husband Grant have lived permanently in Broome, Western Australia since 1999 after living in various outback locations around Western Australia and Darwin. Her childhood was spent in the UAE and Kuwait (before the wars) with flamingos being the highlight close to the Iraq border in the early 80’s. 1985 and 1986 were spent working in Maine and Florida before moving to Australia. In the late 80’s she traveled with her husband birding and working throughout Europe and the USA for 2 years. Until the end of 2014, she did full-time voluntary work for the local Australasian Wader Study Group, which aims to understand and analyze the factors determining shorebird numbers in a rapidly changing world. She was actively involved in fieldwork and maintaining the database. This involved the sighting of these birds both here and overseas resulting in some incredible life stories. She also monitors Pied Oystercatchers breeding along a 23km stretch of beach by bicycle and on foot. She hopes to spread the word about the dangers the shorebirds face as they migrate north each year and the changing bird seasons experienced throughout the year.

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After Peter Penning contributed an insightful and funny post on birding in Uganda, we naturally asked him to become a permanent writer. He seems to have found the perfect way of combining business trips with birding, which is why the title of his beat is “Business Birding”.

Peter is a sustainability management consultant who spends many weeks abroad away from his homes in The Netherlands (work) and Portugal (holidays). Although work distracts him regularly from the observation of birds, he has managed to see a great many species regardless. He firmly believes in the necessity of birders to contribute to conservation. He passively supports BirdLife in the Netherlands and South Africa and actively in Portugal as treasurer of SPEA – Sociedade Portuguesa para o Estudo das Aves. Peter likes to meet people and have good after-birding lunches which has seriously hampered his ability to build up a truly impressive life list. Somehow, he doesn’t care.

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Kai Pflug is an excellent photographer who we are extremely pleased to have sharing his photos of birds in China (and beyond) here every Monday morning. The official title of his beat is “Bird Photography in China and Beyond.”

Kai is a German who has been living in Shanghai for the last twenty years, and who only became interested in birds in China – so he is much more familiar with birds in China than with those in Germany. While only an average birder, he aims to be a good bird photographer and has created a website with bird photos as proof. He hopes not too many clients of his consulting company read this blog, as they will doubt his dedication to providing consulting services related to China’s chemical industry. Whenever he wants to shock other birders, he tells them his (indoor) cats can distinguish several warblers by taste.

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Donna Lynn Schulman was one of the kind Queens birders who helped Corey find his way around his adopted borough when he moved to New York City. A librarian by trade, she is the ideal person to have the Book Review Beat on 10,000 Birds.

Having been attached to books all her life, Donna is thrilled to be engaged in a passion that requires fealty to an information artifact called a “field guide.” Donna divides her birding time between Queens, NY, where she grew up, and central New Jersey, where she is on the faculty of a very large public university, and a volunteer with the Sandy Hook Bird Observatory of New Jersey Audubon. She was a Library Journal book reviewer for 15 years, reviewing over 100 titles, and has also reviewed birding books for the Queens County Bird Club’s News & Notes, which she formerly edited. When she is not birding or photographing dragonflies, or going to the theatre with her wonderful daughter, Donna travels to Florida where she attempts to turn her young nephews into birders, and contemplates writing an article for her blog, Queensgirl.

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Dragan Simic is a name known by many of those who bird eastern Europe. After sharing some excellent guest posts on 10,000 Birds we thought he would be a great addition as a Beat Writer and asked him to join 10,000 Birds. Dragan is now the “Eastern Europe and Beyond” Beat Writer on 10,000 Birds and you can find his posts every-other-Thursday.

Now nearing 50 and duly lost in a mid-life crisis, Dragan Simic took to birding rather late – only half a lifetime ago, after successfully testing his inadequate skills in other life threatening activities, such as rock climbing and vertical caving. In the end, it was birding that has taken him from his native Serbia, across the Balkans and Turkey, to the very borders of the Old World: East Anglia and Spain, southern Africa and India… Beside birds and traveling in search of them, Dragan likes a good beer and the croaky voice of Shane MacGowan, hates confinements of four walls, but prefers four wheels and a lot of elbow room around. Birder by passion and environmentalist by education, he is the coauthor of three common birds guidebooks, the writer and the host of one TV film on birding for beginners, a field researcher, an ecotourism consultant, a bird blogger and a guy who always think that birding must be better behind that next curve of the road, and that the best bird ever is the – next lifer.

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Recently, I was glad to receive a comment from David Tomlinson on one of my posts. I briefly thought about asking David about becoming a beat writer – then, after looking up his many online posts for prestigious and/or well-paying sites, I thought he would not be interested anyway. Just two days later, he contacted me, and I am proud to have him and his beat “Birds and Brecks” on 10,000 Birds. He will contribute his posts every Friday.

David Tomlinson has been interested in birds for as long as he can remember, and has been writing about them for almost as long. An annual highlight is hearing his first cuckoo of the year at home in Suffolk, England, which he rates as almost as exciting as watching White-necked Rockfowls in Ghana or Steller’s Eiders in North Norway. A former tour leader, he has seen an awful lot of birds around the world, and wishes he could remember more of them.

As for the name of David’s beat, here is an explanation in his own words: “Brecks (Breckland) does need an explanation – it’s the name for the region on the Suffolk/Norfolk borders, renowned for its free-draining sandy soils. It has the closest to a Continental climate of anywhere in the UK. At its heart is Thetford Forest, which has the biggest population of nightjars of anywhere in the UK. The stone curlew is the other special bird of the region, again with the biggest population in the UK (over 250 pairs).”

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Beat Writer Posting Calendar

Monday