As 2023 came to a close and 2024 began, your SAS Field Activities Committee found ourselves, like many folks, reviewing the past and planning for the future. Our mission has always been to arrange field trips as educational and recreational activities for SAS members and the community, and we were hard at work in 2023. We’ve attempted to increase our field trips and locales while addressing the pleasure and safety of our attendees. We lost a few long-time leaders, but were able to add quite a few new leaders whose trips we look forward to. We attempted to keep certain tried-and true-locales in our trip repertoire, while adding some different areas to bird. And we continued to work on in-house operations to make processes smoother.

Running numbers for an 11 month period (1/15-12/15/23), we arranged 113 field trips last year, and only 6 were cancelled. So, with 107 field trips completed, we averaged 9.7 trips per month! Additionally, 9 Beginning Birder trips and 9 Family Friendly trips at Effie Yeaw Nature Center were provided by the Beginning Birder and Effie Yeaw groups.

Attendance figures for those 11 months show 983 attendees enjoyed our trips, or about 90 folks per month, for an average of 9 people per trip!

A big thanks to our hard-working Field Activities Committee Members, including Richard Barbieri, Sue Darst, Mary Forrestal, Maureen Geiger, Ben Graber, Nancy Gronert, Rich Howard, and Sonja Sorbo.

As we schedule for 2024, we’ll continue to work hard to provide a number of varied trips so we all may enjoy the great birding opportunities our area has to offer. With that in mind, we welcome your feedback! Are there trips you’re interested in, places you’d like to go? Keep in mind we are an all-volunteer organization, so we may be limited by various factors, but we’ll do our best to continue to provide a variety of trips for your birding pleasure!

Susan Goodrich, Chair

Field Activities Committee