Bill Tweit on a recent trip to Antarctica

Pelagic birds live their lives on the open water, only coming ashore to breed. Join us on Zoom for the monthly general business meeting. Program presenter Bill Tweit will provide some basic information about the marine ecosystem that supports bird life offshore. He will also give an overview of what to expect on a Westport Seabirds pelagic boat trip and some tips on how to prepare.

Bill has been in love with pelagic birding since his first pelagic trip off Montauk, New York in 1971. Two years later, he was on his first Westport Seabirds pelagic trip with Terry Wahl as the leader. This was the first of hundreds of pelagic trips he has taken off Westport. He became one of the leaders for Westport Seabirds in the mid-1970s and feels privileged to have introduced thousands of birders to the abundant marine life in the California Current ecosystem off Washington. He was the regional editor for the Pacific Northwest Region in the journal American Birds for a couple of decades and also worked with Terry Wahl and Steve Mlodinow to write and edit Birds of Washington: Status and Distribution, which was published in 2005.

With the advent of eBird, he became one of the teams who reviews Washington records and also has served several terms on the Washington Bird Records Committee. He lives in Olympia, where he works as a Special Assistant with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. His scope of duties there ranges from Bering Sea fisheries to Columbia River salmon recovery and the hydro system.

Nonmembers, sign up below so that we may send you a Zoom invitation. The program is free. Members do not need to sign up.

For members and nonmembers, we’ll email Zoom invitations to you the day before or the day of the event.