The mission of the Southwest Wings Birding Festival is to promote environmental education, nature-based tourism and the protection of urban and rural habitat, through lectures, workshops, field trips and exhibits.

For those of you not choosing to stay at the Windemere please click here [Visit Sierra Vista] for other lodging opportunities.
Due to increased military activity at Ft. Huachuca there are times when lodging is hard to find. Be sure and make your reservations well in advance.

Sierra Vista lies at the foot of the Huachuca Mountains, minutes away from some of the most famous birding spots in the United States. Places like Garden, Sawmill Huachuca, Ramsey, Carr, Miller and Ash Canyons, places have been known since the late 19th century for their great biodiversity, not only of birds, but of butterflies, odonates and other insects, and mammals and reptiles as well. The Huachucas also have close to 1,000 species of plants. Our field trips and seminars hope to introduce many of these features to our participants.

Some field trips will fan out to other famous birding spots in southeastern Arizona: the Chiricahuas, Patagonia and Sonoita, Arivaca and California Gulch, the San Pedro River and a new trip to the Empire Ranch in the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area. A new overnight trip to a private ranch in Sonora on Wednesday and a Sunday brunch in old Bisbee with birding in the Mule Mountains will begin and end the festival.

August is one of the most beautiful months of the year here. Sierra Vista at 4600 feet elevation is five to ten degrees cooler than Tucson. The monsoon season should be in full swing – and the spectacular thunder showers that can be expected many afternoons not only cool things off nicely – but paint the hills and valleys a beautiful shade of green -unexpected in this part of the country. You will want to bring rain gear to be prepared.

This year our Keynote speaker is Scott Weidensaul (see below).  In addition to the keynote at the Saturday night banquet, Scott will give a reprise of his very popular talk on migration after the welcome buffet on Thursday.  Join Scott on field trips to Empire Ranch, the Chiricahuas and the Brunch in Bisbee/ Mule Mountains trips.

Friday evening there will be a silent auction and Vendors’ Open House, with appetizers and refreshments. Proceeds from the auction go to support our Education program.

Saturday evening will feature the banquet, Scott Weidensaul’s keynote talk and a book signing for Scott and other authors.

Our trips and programs fill quickly – so sign up (with a post mark of June 1, 2007 or later) to be sure you can participate in the programs that most interest you.
[click here to go to Registration info]

"Living on the Wind: The World of Migratory Birds "
At any moment of every day, migratory birds fill the skies of the western hemisphere, journeying from the High Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, across the Atlantic and Pacific, moving by day and night. Join naturalist and author Scott Weidensaul on an exploration of how and why bird migrate, and the conservation challenges that face them, based on his book, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds. The program ranges from the doorstep of the Aleutians in Alaska, and the frozen edge of Hudson Bay in Canada, through the rainforests of Central and South America to the grassy pampas of Argentina, and is filled with the drama and sweep of this remarkable phenomenon.

Born in 1959, Scott Weidensaul (pronounced "Why-densaul") has lived almost all of his life among the long ridges and endless valleys of eastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the central Appalachians, a landscape that has defined much of his work.

His writing career began in 1978 with a weekly natural history column in the local newspaper, the Pottsville Republican in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The column soon led a fulltime reporting job, which he held until 1988, when he left to become a freelance writer specializing in nature and wildlife. (He continued to write on nature for newspapers, however, including long-running columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Harrisburg Patriot-News.)

Weidensaul has written more than two dozen books on natural history, including his widely acclaimed Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (North Point 1999), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Other recent titles include The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species (North Point 2002), about the search for animals that may or may not be extinct, and his most recent work, Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul (North Point 2005), an ambitious journey to take the pulse of America's wildlife and wildlands.

Weidensaul's writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Smithsonian, the New York Times, Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife and Audubon, among many others. He lectures widely on conservation and nature.

In addition to writing about wildlife, Weidensaul is an active field researcher whose work focuses on bird migration. Besides banding hawks each fall (something he's done for almost 20 years), he directs a major effort to study the movements of northern saw-whet owls, one of the smallest and least-understood raptors in North America. Most recently, he has joined a continental effort to understand the rapid evolution, by several species of western hummingbirds, of a new migratory route and wintering range in the East.