Buffalo Ornithological Society
Birding Western New York and the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario

Black-crowned Night Heron - © Sue Barth

UPDATE - This departure is full. Next departure is June of 2027.

The date span for this tour will be Saturday, June 6 - Sunday, June 14, 2026. We will have 7 full days of birding bracketed by our travel days.

Target birds are MANY, but Montana is a large state! Our tour will cover a wide range of habitats in western MT including spruce forests of the Bitterroot Range, high sagebrush valleys, short grass prairie and pothole wetlands. Yes, Great Gray Owls nest in Montana and that will definitely be a target species - why freeze your tuchus off at Zax-Sim Bog in February?!

Our group will fly in/out of Missoula where we will spend our first three nights. After that we hop around between Dillon, Helena, Harlowton, and Great Falls.

Other birds of interest include but are bnot limited to...Dusky Grouse, Long-billed Curlew, Ferruginous Hawk, Williamson's and Red-named Sapsuckers, Lewis's and Three-toed Woodpeckers, Prairie Falcon, Clark’s Nutcracker, Dipper, Sprague's Pipit, several finches, 2 longspurs, Brewer's, Baird’s and Sagebrush Sparrows, MacGillivray's and Townsend's Warblers, Lazuli Bunting and more! Yes, we will also try for Great Gray and Flammulated Owls. We even managed Gray Partridge and Sharp-tailed Grouse last year!

Photo is of a Flammulated Owl.

Saturday, June 6, 2026
Meet at 7:30am at the Kanyoo Trail Parking Lot - see Google map link above.
Leader: Joe Petre
[email protected]
(716) 207-9555

***This trip is by reservation only - please call/text Joe to let him know you would like to join this trip.

Please join BOS member, Joe Petre, on a casual birding by bike tour along the northern section of the Feeder Ditch Trail as well as the surrounding quiet roads of the Tonawanda WMA. This will be a great way to cover a good amount of ground while making stops to look and listen for various species. Plan to bike up to ten miles over both paved and unpaved /gravel roads. Hook up your bike rack and meet the group at 730am - don't forget your helmet and water!

The annual BOS picnic meeting will be held at Tifft Nature Preserve on Wednesday, June 12, at 6 PM.

Weather permitting, bring your meal, a folding chair if you like, and meet at the picnic tables outside the Visitor Center.

The gates will be open to drive back to the staff parking area outside the building. Also, the restrooms will be open 6:00 to 6:30.

After our meals, we will hike the preserve until sunset.

Meeting time is 8:00am in the gravel lot off Alleghany Road (Route 77) across from 10271 Alleghany Road.

Leader is Matthew Nusstein - (716) 446 3376; [email protected]

Matt will be leading our group in search of grassland breeding birds at Darien Lake SP in Genesee County. In the fields at this location, we will be looking for Bobolink, Eastern Meadowlark and Savannah Sparrow. This trip will last approximately 3 hours.

Photo of an Eastern Meadowlark taken by Brad Carlson at nearby Carlton Hill MUA on May 5, 2023.

PLEASE TAKE NOTE -OUR ROUTE
WILL INCLUDE A CREEK CROSSING SO EITHER WEAR SANDALS OR BE PREPARED TO REMOVE SHOES/SOCKS TO CROSS THE CREEK!

Leader - Seaghan Coleman ([email protected]) 716-435-7753

Meet at 730am in the main parking lot.

Join Seaghan this morning as our group seeks out migrants during the busy month of September. Even without a good cold front, migrants are moving through the region nightly and you never know what the day might bring.
With its range of diverse habitats, Woodlawn offers respite to weary winged travelers in the form of sand beach, riparian woods, open lake, grassy dunes and a creek! Neotropical migrants may entertain us in the woods while various sandpipers use the beach to pick through the high water mark for food. Gull flocks that loaf on the beach may offer up more unusual species such as Lesser Black-backed or Little.
Woodlawn regularly supplies the BOS statisticians with review species. Among them are gems such as Piping Plover, American Avocet, Blue Grosbeak, White-eyed Vireo and Cave Swallow.
This will be a half day trip wrapping up around 11:30. Wear footwear appropriate for walking through grassy trails and loose sand.

American Avocets photographed by Charlie Kaars at Woodlawn Beach SP on September 22, 2024.

PLEASE NOTE - This meeting will be coordinated to coincide with the annual Vaughan Lecture and will occur on the THIRD Wednesday of September!
Meet at 7 pm at the Museum.

Our first meeting back after summer break. Dr. Baiz's topic will be forthcoming. The usual 'Member's Night' topic will be pushed to our October meeting.

Saturday, October 10th, 2026

BOS members are encouraged to participate. Please help us add to the decades of records that the BOS has collected reflecting population dynamics of the area birdlife. You can be part of a field team or simply count birds at your backyard feeder. All observations are important! If you don't know what section you live in, please contact Marcie Jacklin who will put you into contact with the correct section compiler. Thank you so much!

Compiler: Marcie Jacklin ([email protected] or 905-871-2577)

More about the October Count: more info »

Photo of a Northern Shoveler from the Batavia WWTP on October 23, 2025 taken by Andrea Heine.

Meet at 7 pm in the Cummings Room at the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Meeting topic to be added.

UPDATE 12/23/25 - This departure is full. If you are interested, I can add you to a waiting list. There will be a second departure offered in November 2027.

Andrea Heine and Celeste Morien put me up to this and I couldn’t be more excited! Africa has always been a place that I have wanted to travel to because I grew up watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins!
This will be a 17-day tour, plus travel days to/from Africa, that will have us birding Namibia and a bit of Botswana, including Etosha and Chobe NPs and Victoria Falls. This trip is still in the planning stages so these dates are NOT SET IN STONE and may vary by a day or two. At a maximum our group would number 12 in total and that will get us two guides and two 8-seat safari cruisers.
The bird list is ridiculously incredible and includes families such as Bee-eaters, Rollers, Sandgrouse, Hornbills, Bustards, Cisticolas, Larks, Sunbirds, Coursers, Spurfowl and more. Specific birds include Bateleur, Secretarybird, Ostrich, Lilac-breasted Roller, Verreaux’s Eagle, Pygmy Falcon, Rockrunner, White-crested Helmet-Shrike, Emerald Spotted Wood Dove, Marsh Owl, Black Bustard, Bat Hawk and scores more!
We will also see some of Africa’s iconic large mammals possibly including African Bush Elephant, Black Rhinoceros, Kudu, Lion, two species of Zebra, Giraffe (Angolan subspecies), Oryx and Warthog.
The date span of the safari will be Sunday, November 1 through Tuesday, November 17. We will likely fly into Johannesburg, South Africa on an overnight flight from the US on Friday, October 30, arriving on Saturday, October 31, spending the night near the airport and then take a 1-way flight (about 1 hr 40 min) from Johannesburg to either Kasane, Botswana or Windhoek, Namibia - this will depend on which city our tour will begin/end. At the end of our tour, we would again take a 1-way flight back to Johannesburg from either Windhoek or Kasane.
If this is a trip you would be interested in taking with the BOS, please e-mail me so I can get an idea of the possible group size. A ballpark figure for a trip like this would be around $9500 which would include the flight from Buffalo to Johannesburg (around $2300 today 4/22/25), two 1-way flights from Johannesburg to Windhoek/Kasane and back (around $450 for both as of 4/22/25), and two extra nights in a Johannesburg hotel near the airport at the start and end of the trip. A single supplement will cost about $800. The sample flight I looked at out of Buffalo has one layover in Atlanta for 4 hours, departing Bflo at 3:30pm on a Friday and arriving in Johannesburg the next day at 7:00pm.
I should have a more precise figure by summer ‘25 as it will be dependent upon the number of participants as well as getting the 2026 costs for lodges. Also keep in mind the currency fluctuations between the US dollar against the South African Rand.

Photo of a Secretarybird taken on the Etosha Pan.

Meet at 7 pm in the Cummings Room at the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Meeting topic to be added.

Annual Holiday Celebration at 7:00 PM in the Cummings Room of the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Please bring a treat to share and enjoy an evening of birding friendship.

UPDATE 11/26/24…Speaking with Brent to set up a second departure that will begin on February 6, 2027 and extend two weeks.

UPDATE 8/7/24…this trip is now full at 8 participants. A waiting list has been started.

Well, I never thought I would be even considering a birding trip to New Zealand, BUT HERE WE ARE! This is an incredible opportunity to bird New Zealand with one of her native sons and past BOS member, Brent Stephenson! Brent lived in the Buffalo area for a few years before moving to Vermont with his wife, Lisa.
The group will depart Buffalo on Monday, January 18, 2027 to allow us to arrive on January 20 (due to crossing the International Date Line we will ‘lose’ a day (Jan 19) on the way to NZ). The birding tour will then begin on Thursday, January 21, 2027. This trip will be limited to 8 participants and the land-based portion of the trip will cost about $7000 (this includes all lodging/meals/guiding/travel within country/multiple pelagics/ferry rides) plus your airfare. It is a trip worth saving for and you have a good two years to do so!
Details and itinerary will be added here over the next few months…
In the meantime, if you are considering this trip, you may want to order Brent’s book “Birds of New Zealand: A Photographic Guide” by Scofield and Stephenson. The digital version of the field guide is also available! I just ordered mine off of Amazon! You have 2.5 years to study….GO!

Photo is of an endemic parrot, the Kea.

The dates for this trip are as follows…depart Buffalo on Thursday, February 4, 2027 and arrive in Auckland on Saturday, February 6, 2027 (due to crossing the international dateline we will ‘lose’ a day (Feb 5) on the trip to NZ). The birding tour would begin on Sunday, February 7 and run for two weeks, wrapping up on Saturday, February 20, 2027.

Well, I never thought I would be even considering a birding trip to New Zealand, BUT HERE WE ARE! This is an incredible opportunity to bird New Zealand with one of her native sons and past BOS member, Brent Stephenson! Brent lived in the Buffalo area for a few years before moving to Vermont with his wife, Lisa.
This trip is a ways out and Brent and I are still figuring out the logistics but the 2-week itinerary will embark on February 7, 2027. The group will plan to arrive a day before the tour begins (February 6 ((Day 0 of the tour)) to give us a day to adjust to the loooong travel day and time zone difference! This trip will be limited to 8 participants and the land-based portion of the trip will cost about $7000 (this includes all lodging/meals/guiding/travel within country/multiple pelagics/ferry rides) plus your airfare. It is a trip worth saving for and you have a good two years to do so!
Details and itinerary will be added here over the next few months…
In the meantime, if you are considering this trip, you may want to order Brent’s book “Birds of New Zealand: A Photographic Guide” by Scofield and Stephenson. I just ordered mine off of Amazon! You have 2.5 years to study….GO!

Photo of Yellow-eyed Penguins, Katiki Point, South Island by Brendan Tucker 11/2024.

UPDATE 12/29/25 - This departure only has two openings available. The itinerary will be forthcoming. You can link this trip with the Jewels of Ecuador tour which will visit the High Andes, foothills and Pacific Lowlands.

This trip runs from February 28, 2027 - March 9, 2027.

This trip will be spent between two Amazonian lodges situated along the Napo River, which is a tributary of the mighty Amazon - three nights at each. Both Sani Lodge and Napo Wildlife Center (links embedded in the itinerary) have canopy towers which will offer spectacular views of the tree tops and close views of birds that would be very difficult to see from the ground. We will also visit a clay lick where parrots/parakeets/macaws visit in the early morning to ingest the clay minerals which help to neutralize toxins found in rainforest fruits and seeds. A recent video taken at Napo of an adult Crested Eagle raiding an Oropendola colony had me quite captivated! Travel to/from these lodges is by motorized boats which will offer views of birds and mammals as we come and go.
There are so many iconic species to be seen such as Blue-and-Yellow-Macaw, Zigzag Heron, Hoatzin, Horned Screamer, Gray-winged Trumpeter, Blue-throated Piping-Guan, Swallow Tanager, Ladder-tailed Nightjar, several of the large Woodpeckers, and Hawk-Eagles among so many, many others! We will take an interior flight from Quito to Coca to start off our Amazon tour.

Photo from our January 2025 trip - in front of one of the canopy towers in the Amazon.

This Ecuador trip will be a shorter 10-day tour focusing on comfortable lodges that offer amazing nectar and fruit feeder set-ups! Leisurely viewing and great photographic opportunities with up close views of many tanagers, hummingbirds, toucans, barbets, woodcreepers, woodpeckers and more! This will be our fourth tour with our amazing guide, Nelson, and our equally amazing driver, Orlando!
We will visit several of my favorite locations including WildSumaco Lodge, Las Terrazas de Dana in Mindo and Bellavista Cloudforest Lodge. We will have less moving around on this itinerary, allowing for more leisurely birding at feeders and on short walks while still seeing an amazing array of species. Several of our stops will allow us to hand feed hummingbirds as well!
Details will be forthcoming for this 10 day tour which will allow us 8 full days of birding in the stunning country of Ecuador!
If this departure entices you, please email me ([email protected]) to have your name added to the participant list! This trip will run from March 10 - 19, 2027.

Photo is of a pair of Rose-faced Parrots from Amagusa Reserve (we will be visiting this amazing location).

The date span for this tour will be Saturday, June 19 - Sunday, June 27, 2027. We will have 7 full days of birding bracketed by our travel days.

Target birds are MANY, but Montana is a large state! Our tour will cover a wide range of habitats in western MT including spruce forests of the Bitterroot Range, high sagebrush valleys, short grass prairie and pothole wetlands. Yes, Great Gray Owls nest in Montana and that will definitely be a target species - why freeze your tuchus off at Zax-Sim Bog in February?!

Our group will fly in/out of Missoula where we will spend our first three nights. After that we hop around between Dillon, Helena, Harlowton, and Great Falls.

Other birds of interest include but are not limited to...Dusky Grouse, Long-billed Curlew, Ferruginous Hawk, Williamson's and Red-named Sapsuckers, Lewis's and Three-toed Woodpeckers, Prairie Falcon, Clark’s Nutcracker, Dipper, Sprague's Pipit, several finches, 2 longspurs, Brewer's, Baird’s and Sagebrush Sparrows, MacGillivray's and Townsend's Warblers, Lazuli Bunting and more! Yes, we will also try for Great Gray and Flammulated Owls. We even managed Gray Partridge and Sharp-tailed Grouse in 2025!

Photo is of a Chestnut-collared Longspur.

Please Note - This trip may be combined with Southern Spain - Migration at the Straight of Gibraltar which runs immediately after this Falsterbo, Sweden trip.

This trip will be limited to 6 participants, plus myself, and will span 6 full days of birding plus 2 1/2 travel days (due to overnight flight and 6-hour time zone difference).
We will depart Buffalo on Friday, September 3, 2027 on an overnight flight to Copenhagen, Denmark; arriving midday Saturday, September 4. We fly home on Saturday, September 11, 2027. Flights for western Europe depart in the afternoon from the eastern US, fly overnight and arrive at destination the following morning/afternoon. Our flight back to the US will likely depart Copenhagen mid-morning to get us home the same evening (Sept 11).
Our British guide, Stephen Menzie, will pick us up from the Copenhagen airport and drive 45 minutes across the Oresund Bridge to the town of Vellinge, Sweden where we will stay at a working organic farm for our tour.
Falsterbo has a bird observatory where point counts and banding are conducted and our tour will be based nearby. Daily itinerary will be dictated by the weather as this is a migration bottleneck, like legendary Cape May, NJ or Point Pelee, Ontario. This tour will coincide with a wide variety of migrants, and if migration isn't especially active we will head inland to search out forest species such as Black Woodpecker! Target birds will be many including…Eurasian Hobby, Bearded Reedling, Eurasian Curlew and Oystercatcher, Pied Avocet and Lapwing, there species of Harrier, Wagtails, Pipits, both Green and Black Woodpeckers and so forth and so on! Stay tuned for updates! If you are interested, let me know so that I can add your name to the participant list - [email protected]

Here is the link to the trip report from the September 2025 tour…

https://ebird.org/tripreport/407694

Photo of the 2025 group.

UPDATE - This departure is tentatively full. A wait list has been started.

This tour start date is set. We will be flying in/out of Seville, Spain. If you plan to piggyback this trip onto the Sweden trip running the previous week, we will be flying from Copenhagen, Denmark to Seville. I will be looking into flight options from the States for those only attending the Southern Spain tour.

This is just a ‘heads-up’ notice for this departure. I am planning to tie it into the Falsterbo, Sweden trip the week previous. This will be a tour focused on migration in southern Spain - specifically in the area around Tarifa and the Strait of Gibraltar on the Mediterranean. I scouted this area after the Falsterbo 2025 trip and the bird migration was SPECTACULAR! Kettles of White Storks, Booted Eagles and Short-toed Snake-Eagles, European Bee-eaters, Hoopoes, Black Storks, Lesser Kestrels, Alpine Swifts overhead as the birds headed south over the Mediterranean. In the nearby wetlands and agricultural areas we had Spanish Eagle, Eurasian and Ruppell’s Griffons, Blue Rock Thrush, Northern Bald Ibis, White-headed and Ferruginous Ducks, Woodchat Shrike, Squacco and Purple Herons, Egyptian Vulture and I can’t forget the Sedge Wren-like Zitting Cisticola! Stay tuned for details on this one! Oh yeah - the food was pretty darn fantastic as well!

Photo is of a Short-toed Snake-Eagle.

Andrea Heine and Celeste Morien put me up to this and I couldn’t be more excited! Africa has always been a place that I have wanted to travel to because I grew up watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins!
This will be a 17-day tour, plus travel days to/from Africa, that will have us birding Namibia and a bit of Botswana, including Etosha and Chobe NPs and Victoria Falls. This trip is still in the planning stages so these dates are NOT SET IN STONE and may vary by a day or two. At a maximum our group would number 12 in total and that will get us two guides and two 8-seat safari cruisers.
The bird list is ridiculously incredible and includes families such as Bee-eaters, Rollers, Sandgrouse, Hornbills, Bustards, Cisticolas, Larks, Sunbirds, Coursers, Spurfowl and more. Specific birds include Bateleur, Secretarybird, Ostrich, Lilac-breasted Roller, Verreaux’s Eagle, Pygmy Falcon, Rockrunner, White-crested Helmet-Shrike, Emerald Spotted Wood Dove, Marsh Owl, Black Bustard, Bat Hawk and scores more!
We will also see some of Africa’s iconic large mammals possibly including African Bush Elephant, Black Rhinoceros, Kudu, Lion, two species of Zebra, Giraffe (Angolan subspecies), Oryx and Warthog.
The date span of the safari will be Sunday, November 1 through Tuesday, November 17. We will likely fly into Johannesburg, South Africa on an overnight flight from the US on Friday, October 30, arriving on Saturday, October 31, spending the night near the airport and then take a 1-way flight (about 1 hr 40 min) from Johannesburg to either Kasane, Botswana or Windhoek, Namibia - this will depend on which city our tour will begin/end. At the end of our tour, we would again take a 1-way flight back to Johannesburg from either Windhoek or Kasane.
If this is a trip you would be interested in taking with the BOS, please e-mail me so I can get an idea of the possible group size. A ballpark figure for a trip like this would be around $9500 which would include the flight from Buffalo to Johannesburg (around $2300 today 4/22/25), two 1-way flights from Johannesburg to Windhoek/Kasane and back (around $450 for both as of 4/22/25), and two extra nights in a Johannesburg hotel near the airport at the start and end of the trip. A single supplement will cost about $800. The sample flight I looked at out of Buffalo has one layover in Atlanta for 4 hours, departing Bflo at 3:30pm on a Friday and arriving in Johannesburg the next day at 7:00pm.
I should have a more precise figure by summer ‘25 as it will be dependent upon the number of participants as well as getting the 2026 costs for lodges. Also keep in mind the currency fluctuations between the US dollar against the South African Rand.

The dates are set and this trip will run from Wednesday, January 12 - Thursday, January 27, 2028. We will again have Pablo Barrera and Luz Osorio as our guides as they take us birding through the Colombian Andes - or as Luz calls it, the Coffee Triangle. Details will be forthcoming. There are two spaces remaining for this departure.

The stunning Multicolored Tanager frequents fruit feeders at one of our stops along this tour!

I am currently working with Nelson to put together a tour of Southern Ecuador. If you have traveled with Nelson to the Andes and Amazon, this trip will be a great addition to your country travels and add a good number of new species. This trip will likely disembark in early to mid-March of 2028 and will run for 16 full days of birding bracketed by two travel days. It is possible Nelson may offer a Galapagos extension after this trip so stay tuned for one, the other, or both!

Photo of a Rainbow Starfrontlet from Loja, southern Ecuador.

This is a ‘place holder’ for this tour which I am planning on running immediately after the Southern Ecuador Tour. The dates for both of these tours have not been settled upon just yet. The Galapagos Tour will run for 9 full days of birding bracketed by two, possibly three, travel days. Targets will include as many of the endemics as possible along with species like Waved Albatross, Blue-footed and Nazca Boobies, Swallow-tailed Gull, Red-billed Tropicbird, Great Frigatebird and more.

Photo of Waved Albatross taken by BOS member, Patrick Sysiong in August 2025.

UPDATE 2/28/26 - This departure is already full at 6 participants. I will offer this trip again in June 2029. If you are interested, reach out to me asap as this departure will likely fill as well.

Currently working on planning this trip with Dave Irons and Shawneen Finnegan as our guides. This trip will run for a full 7 days of birding bracketed by two travel days and will begin the weekend after the July 4 holiday (2028). Stay tuned for details.

Photo of a male Mountain Quail from July of 2025 near Benton, Oregon.

I am currently. Working on setting up a trip to Thailand! The date is just a ‘space holder’ for a time being but I am aiming to run this 2- to 3-week trip in January of 2029. The main tour will run 16 days or so and cover Northern and Central Thailand. I am looking into offering a Southern Thailand extension that would run an additional 6 days. I figure, if you are flying all the way over there, you may as well try for as many birds as possible! Stay tuned for details and as usual, if this trip is of interest to you, let me know so that I can add your name to the participant list. I think this trip will be limited to 8 and I’m fairly certain this will fill up!
Spoon-billed Sandpiper will of course be a main target!

This is a place-holder for the second Oregon tour scheduled for early June 2029. Tour 1 filled very fast so if you are interested in birding Oregon, reach out to me asap to get on the list. This trip will be limited to 6 participants.

Currently working on planning this trip with Dave Irons and Shawneen Finnegan as our guides. This trip will run for a full 7 days of birding bracketed by two travel days and will begin in early June (2029). Stay tuned for details.

Photo of a Northern Pygmy-Owl from June of 2023 near Crook, Oregon.