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Michael O'Brien

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Michael at Mt. Rainier © Louise Zemaitis

Michael teaching Birding by Ear class on foggy morning in Cape May, May 2009 © Louise Zemaitis

Michael guiding in Cape May © Louise Zemaitis

Seabirding during cocktail hour, Galapagos, 2019 © Louise Zemaitis

Teaching shorebird ID class in Cape May, May 2009 © Louise Zemaitis

Michael, Louise, and Ruben Arevalo with group in Lamanai, Belize © Warren Cooke

Michael, Louise, and group watching trogon, Camp Chiricahua © Jennie Duberstein

Field sketching with young birders, Camp Chiricahua, 2014 © Jennie Duberstein

Michael at Cave Creek Canyon, August 2012 © Louise Zemaitis

Getting acquainted with a Snapping Turtle, Cape May Point, 2015 © Dick Walton

Black-capped Petrels illustration

Michael and Louise at home, August 2020 © Michael O'Brien

My fascination with birds started at an early age. I grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and can barely remember a time when I wasn’t a birder. Inspired by my father’s interest in birds, my brother and I both started birding when we were little kids. We would all bird together locally, and take the occasional trip to the coast or mountains. My first time out of the Northeast was when I was fourteen and we took a family vacation out West, including a week of birding in Southeast Arizona. Truly a life-changing experience, and one that solidified my love of travel. But as much as I loved visiting other regions, I was just as happy and engaged birding at home. As a young birder, I was lucky to live next to an extensive wooded stream valley with an adjacent dairy farm. I spent most of my spare time birding this area intensively, which gave me a strong appreciation for the ebb and flow of migration. I always savored those magical moments that marked the changing seasons, like spring mornings when warbler song filled the woods, or those October days when the farm filled up with sparrows, sometimes including a rarity like Clay-colored or Henslow’s. When hawks were migrating, I often sat out on a lawn chair to count what passed by. And when birds were migrating at night, I pulled out the lawn chair again and often sat for hours listening to thrushes and other birds calling as they passed overhead in the darkness. Although I didn’t know what many of the “seeps” and “zeeps” were, I was enthralled by the idea of all these birds flying over while nobody was watching, and totally stoked when I heard something crazy like a King Rail or a flock of Long-tailed Ducks—flying over the suburbs!

As long as I’ve been watching birds, I’ve been drawing them as well. For me, drawing and sketching birds has always been about observation. I don’t know of a better way to learn the details of a bird’s appearance than to draw it, so art has always been linked to my interest in field identification. In my late teens, it was both an honor and a great learning experience to illustrate monthly ID articles in the Audubon Naturalist Newsletter for the late Claudia Wilds, possibly the most meticulous observer I’ve ever known. She lifted both my identification skills and my art to higher levels. With an art degree from Long Island University, I contemplated pursuing an art career and quickly discovered what the term “starving artist” meant. Though art has never sustained me, over the years I’ve done a number of exciting art jobs, including some field guide plates for both the National Geographic and Peterson guides.

Although I never imagined it when I was a kid, my career path turned out to be going out in the field, watching birds—initially conducting field work for various research projects or migration counts, and eventually leading birding tours. And along the way, I discovered that I had a passion for solving field identification puzzles, and for sharing what I had learned. From the early 90s onward, I have always been involved in one project or another. My fascination with the calls of nocturnal migrants took a giant leap forward when I met Bill Evans, who, as it turns out, was even more obsessed with nocturnal flight calls than I was! We spent a decade unraveling these mystery calls, culminating in our CD-ROM, Flight Calls of Migratory Birds, published in 2002. Then, shifting gears a bit, while conducting shorebird workshops, I became frustrated that there wasn’t a good guide that showed shorebirds in comparative poses, how you see them in real life. So, along with my friends Richard Crossley and Kevin Karlson, we decided to fill that void and published The Shorebird Guide in 2006. Switching back to bird sounds, I was pleased to be primary author of the handheld and online app, Larkwire, a game and reference tool for learning bird sounds, first published in 2011, with expanded content since then. These days, most of my spare time goes into work on the forthcoming Princeton Guide to Birds of North America, a project I have been involved with since 2007. I am one of four authors, along with Steve Howell, Brian Sullivan, and Chris Wood. Our two brilliant artists are Ian Lewington and Lorenzo Starnini. What a privilege it has been to be a part of such a talented team!

I met Louise Zemaitis in Cape May, New Jersey in 1994. Both of us were participants in the World Series of Birding, a bird-a-thon fundraiser for conservation. We were on competing teams at first (a whole other story!), but ultimately joined forces and were married in 1997. We’ve been partners in crime ever since, and, have had the great fortune to travel extensively throughout the Americas, and to such far-flung places as Antarctica and Tanzania, leading tours together. My two amazing stepsons, Bradley and Alec, graciously put up with my quirkiness, and have been able to join us on a number of scouting trips. Both are now grown and busy making the world a better place, and I couldn’t be prouder of them.

Because of some wonderful opportunities through Leica Sport Optics, the American Birding Association, and VENT, Louise and I have had the great fortune to work with young birders in various programs for the past twenty-five years. It’s the most rewarding work we do. It may be a cliché, but we all know that kids are our future, and particularly the future of conservation. It has been a special privilege to be able to guide, even in a small way, the paths of some of these brilliant young naturalists, and to open their eyes to new ideas or new ways of looking at the world. And it absolutely goes both ways. We learn from them as much as they learn from us, and our lives are richer for it.

At home in Cape May, Louise and I conduct numerous workshops for Cape May Bird Observatory, and I also coordinate our annual midsummer butterfly count. And when I’m not leading tours or writing, I thoroughly enjoy time spent in my yard. During our forced COVID sabbatical, in addition to writing, I spent a lot of time in my yard, removing invasive plants, planting native ones, and of course, birding. I’ve been keeping track of what birds pass through the yard for years, something that has always given me great satisfaction. But starting in 2020, with the help of iNaturalist, I put a lot more effort into cataloging everything else—every plant, spider, insect, or any other critter that I come across, and have cataloged more than 2,000 species thus far. It’s amazing how much you can discover in your own backyard! And the more I learn about my own little patch, the more I notice during all of my travels. It also makes me realize how much I don’t know, which will always keep life interesting.