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About MaBo

I began birding when my parents (~5 yrs old) erected a feeder shelf off of my childhood kitchen window, and we had flocks of 40-50 Evening Grosbeaks in the winter time in Eastern Ontario (Canada). I began seriously birding when I moved to Newfoundland (an island off the East Coast of Canada) to go to school. I was lucky enough to secure a series of summer jobs working for one of the foremost researchers in the area of alcid behaviour and ornamentation. I spent one summer off of the coast of Labrador in the Gannet Island cluster. I was a research technician helping with the study of Atlantic Puffins, Razorbills, Common and Thick-billed Murres and Black Guillemots. Needless to say I was hooked after this experience. I was also lucky enough to see many Atlantic vagrants. The next summer, I was signed with the same supervisor to go the Aleutian Island of Kiska. I was living on the side of a volcano in a bird colony of an unimaginable number of birds (est. 2-12 million pairs of birds). I worked with Least and Crested Auklets but regularly saw Whiskered and Parakeet Auklets, Tufted and Horned Puffins, Red-faced and Pelagic Cormorants and some many Siberian vagrants on the island. The boat trip to and from the island involved some surveys of the surrounding islands which was just amazing. After this experience, I was obsessed! I have since moved to Vancouver Island off the West Coast of Canada and have been here for two years. But not before driving across the entire country from tip to tip (check the map of Canada!) in the springtime. I feel very lucky to have an understanding girlfriend who allows me to stop on busy and (not so busy) highways on my various road trips to look at birds. This summer I am moving back to Ontario, but not before driving up to the Arctic for some wicked Northern breeding species. Andrew

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