2025 FESTIVAL VIPS

David Lindo

David Lindo

David Lindo aka The Urban Birder - broadcaster, writer, speaker, educator and bird tour leader. His mission is to engage city folk around the world with the environment through the medium of birds. He is an accomplished speaker delivering talks for live and online audiences all around the world ranging from just a few individuals to over a thousand people. The venues have included bird club meetings and bird watching festivals across the globe to presentations to government bodies, music festivals and deliveries to corporations and institutions.

He has written countless articles on urban birds, urban bird conservation and wildlife in general for many publications, magazines and websites and has also written the forewords to several books. He is a regular television and radio presenter being featured on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 in the UK as well as other TV and radio channels around the world including CBS in the United States.

He was recently named as the 7th most influential person in wildlife by BBC Wildlife Magazine and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) Columnist of the Year Award. He has sat as a judge for the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021 and annually since 2021 for the Bird Photographer of the Year.

David is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers and a member of the British Travel Writers Guild. He is also the Founder of the Tower 42 Bird Study Group and in 2015, Britain’s Vote National Bird Campaign that resulted in over 226,000 votes which was the largest vote for nature by an individual.In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious HH Bloomer Award by the Linnean Society of London and there is a play based on his life as The Urban Birder currently being staged by Wroclaw Contemporary Theatre Poland.

David is the author of The Urban Birder (Bloomsbury) 2011, Tales From Concrete Jungles (Bloomsbury) 2015, #Urban Birding (Kosmos) 2018, How To Be An Urban Birder (Princeton/WildGuides) 2018; and children’s books The Extraordinary World of Birds (DK) 2022 and Fly (Magic Cat Publishing) 2024

Kenn Kaufman

Kenn Kaufman

An avid naturalist since the age of six, Kenn Kaufman burst onto the national birding scene as a teenager in the 1970s, hitchhiking all over North America in pursuit of all the bird species he could find—an adventure chronicled in his cult-classic book Kingbird Highway. After several years as a professional tour leader, taking birding groups to all seven continents, he transitioned to a career as a writer, illustrator, and editor. He is among the youngest persons ever to receive the highest honor of the American Birding Association—and the only person to receive it twice. He has authored or coauthored thirteen books about birds and nature, including his own series of Kaufman Field Guides. Since the 1980s, he has been an editor and consultant on birds for the National Audubon Society, and he’s been a Fellow of the American Ornithological Society since 2013. Kenn lives in Oak Harbor, Ohio, with his wife, Kimberly Kaufman, who is also a dedicated naturalist and the director of a local bird observatory.

Kimberly Kaufman

Kimberly Kaufman

Kimberly Kaufman is an Ohio native whose lifelong love of the outdoors grew into a passion for birds in the 1990s. She monitored nesting Bald Eagles for the Ohio Division of Wildlife and ran bluebird trails before she began banding migrant songbirds for the Black Swamp Bird Observatory (BSBO). Kim's involvement with BSBO escalated as she became the observatory's education director in 2005 and then executive director in 2009, a position she still holds. Kim played a key role in starting the highly successful Ohio Young Birders Club, a group for teenagers that has served as a model for youth programs in 13 other states, as well as The Biggest Week In American Birding, a spring event that rapidly has become one of the largest birding festivals on the continent. She is a contributing editor to Birds & Blooms magazine and coauthor of the Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of New England and Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest. In 2015, Kimberly received the American Birding Association's prestigious Chandler Robbins Award in recognition of her contributions to bird education and conservation. 

 

Rebecca Heisman

Rebecca Heisman

Rebecca Heisman is an award-winning science writer who lives in Walla Walla, Washington. She has contributed to publications including Audubon, Living Bird (the magazine of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), Bird Conservation (the magazine of the American Bird Conservancy), and Scientific American. Her first book, Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration, recounts the surprising untold stories behind how we know what we know about bird migration.

You can read her work and subscribe to her newsletter at rebeccaheisman.com.

 

Jon Dunn

Jon Dunn

Jon's interest in birds developed from the age of eight when he became absorbed with the Hooded Orioles in his yard in the L.A. area in 1962. He has written extensively about birds since the 1970's, often with his colleague, Kimball Garrett. Together they wrote Birds of Southern California, Status and Distribution (1981) and Warblers (1997). Jon also worked extensively with Jonathan Alderfer and together co-authored the Birds of North America by the National Geographic Society up through the 7th edition (2017) and Birding Essentials (2007) and co-edited the three editions of the Complete Birds of North America by National Geographic. Jon has served on various committees, notably the California Bird Records Committee (30 years), the ABA Checklist Committee and the Committee on Taxonomy and Nomenclature of the AOS (2000 to present). Beyond birds Jon has an interest in history and the music and poetry of Leonard Cohen.