A naturalist's life on Long Island.

I was eleven years old when I watched The Big Year, the 2011 movie about three guys chasing a North American bird record. I walked outside with a pair of binoculars and never really came back in. What started as a kid's obsession turned into a career.

Today I work as a wildlife biologist and environmental educator. I lead the Young Birders Club at the South Fork Natural History Museum, run owl walks and winter sea-duck tours, and teach people of all ages how to read the landscape they live in.

In 2025 I dedicated the year to a Suffolk County Big Year and ended with 319 species, the new county record. Ninety-three percent of those birds I found on my own, rather than chasing other people's reports. That part matters to me. The full story's here.

Birds trained me to look carefully. That skill, staying still and noticing what most people walk past, applies to everything. I fish the South Shore at night for smooth dogfish and stripers. I stop for tiger beetles. I know which orchids grow in the pine barrens and when the shorebird migration peaks at the same inlet.

Long Island is a narrow strip between the Sound and the Atlantic, and it packs in more habitat than people expect: maritime scrub, glacial kettle ponds, barrier beaches, oak savanna. I grew up in all of it. The Big Year was about birds, but it was really about learning to read a landscape, and that reading doesn't stop at feathers.