Steve Howell
Steve Howell blames his parents for his lifelong interest in birds. While other kids spent their summer holidays on the beach, Steve’s parents headed to some scenic region of Britain where getting out in the country, fly-fishing, and the local pubs provided a change from more conventional holiday destinations. There were no other kids, so Steve developed a fascination with the natural world of Britain’s woodlands, streams, and hill country—which his parents were familiar with and happy to share. “A passing phase,” they thought, but no—birds and other wildlife have been a focus in Steve’s life for as long as he can remember.
Steve’s parents joined the local bird club (formidably entitled the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society, Ornithological Section) and, on their field trips, Steve met other young birders. Memories from the early 1970s include a spring bird walk in some woods near Cardiff, when the world of bird sounds was opened up as the wonder that it is, and a boat trip to Lundy Island, when all aboard learned that Black Terns are pelagic in the non-breeding season.
Steve grew up on the eastern edge of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, whence he could cycle to the nearby coast. Much of his time was spent looking over the mudflats of the Severn Estuary where, in April 1973, he met Al Venables—then the county bird recorder for Monmouthshire. Al became a mentor and lifelong friend, and, importantly, he had a car and invited Steve to help with monthly BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) censuses of coastal waterbirds. Most memories of those BTO surveys involve cold, windy, rainy, early mornings followed by cold, windy, rainy, late mornings counting distant ducks and shorebirds.
The mid 1970s through 1980 were marked by regular travel to “distant” birding destinations such as Cornwall and Scotland, and later France, Spain, Morocco, and Israel. Steve caught the listing bug in 1976 and would travel at the ring of a phone for some rare bird: his 300th UK species was an Ivory Gull in January 1980. Birding companions in this period included the late Laurel Tucker, who encouraged Steve’s limited artistic talents and gave him a “reject” pen-and-ink sketch of a Wilson’s Phalarope, which sits framed on Steve’s office wall. After university, Steve planned a couple of years of travel and birding before returning to Britain and settling down: one year in North America and one in Australia, where his two brothers lived at the time. But hitchhiking back from an unsuccessful twitch for Lesser Kestrel in Cornwall, he got a ride with some birders who had just been to Mexico and raved about it. Steve had barely heard of Mexico but it sounded great, so he put it in his travel plans after visiting his brother in Florida. He crossed into Mexico in November 1981, speaking no Spanish and not even knowing North American birds, and quickly became captivated by the country.
Steve’s first visit to Mexico opened his eyes to an unfamiliar and exciting avifauna—too much to learn, but what a great time trying. Seeing 206 species in rainy Wales in 12 years versus 210 species in sunny Mexico in 12 hours doesn’t make him long for the UK! Since first visiting Mexico, Steve has adopted a somewhat fatalistic philosophy, following his interests without worrying too much about the future. He spent six years living out of a backpack, sleeping in ditches, hitchhiking and taking buses from Florida to Alaska, from California to Panama, never spending more than a month or so in one place and learning about birds at every possible moment. In 1982, he slept on the floor of Jon Dunn and Paul Lehman’s apartment in Santa Barbara (when Paul showed him his first Wrentits). In 1983, after volunteering as a bird-bander at Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO) in the fall, Steve and Peter Pyle drove a VW bug 14,000 miles all over Mexico, working on their lists for every Mexican state and learning a huge amount in the process—including a lot of helpful Spanish vocabulary for car parts.
While wandering around Mexico and Central America, Steve often considered writing a guide to Mexican birds—the existing Peterson guide, a landmark in its time, had become dated. At PRBO in 1983, he had met Sophie Webb, a young biologist and artist, and in the mid-1980s they made the decision to do this book. It was very carefully thought out and would take only 2 years, maybe 3: wrong! It took over 10 years and was a labor of love for two young and naive souls. As well as many months of fieldwork (which included rediscovering a few species), there were a cumulative 3 years in New York and other cities visiting museum bird collections and libraries. Finally they were freed of their burden, and in 1995 A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America was published.
Steve’s interest by then had turned to Chile, for no obvious reason—perhaps because it was as far from Mexico as he could get in the Neotropics, and it has some great seabirds and shorebirds. Steve first visited Chile in 1992 and now feels at home with the birds both there and in Mexico. Besides neotropical birds, Steve loves seabirds—he has spent over two years of his life at sea and has encountered more than 90% of the world’s tubenoses.
Concurrent with researching the Mexico guide, writing became a habit. Steve has authored and co-authored several other books including A Bird-finding Guide to Mexico (1999), Hummingbirds of North America: the Photographic Guide (2002), and, with Jon Dunn, the Peterson Reference Guide to Gulls of the Americas (2007); he has also written numerous scientific and popular articles ranging from the identification of petrels and frigatebirds, to the taxonomy of tapaculos and hummingbirds, to molt in woodpeckers and gulls. He serves on the editorial board of Cotinga (the journal of the Neotropical Bird Club), is past book review editor for the journal Western Birds, and is a past member of the California Bird Records Committee.
Steve holds the position of Research Associate at PRBO and at the California Academy of Sciences. Current projects include writing a photographic identification guide to North American tubenoses and a popular guide to molt in North American birds. His “chronic” writing habit was recognized in 2005 when the American Birding Association (ABA) awarded him the Robert Ridgway Award for publications contributing to field ornithology. Learning and teaching are two key interests that Steve combines with travel and watching birds. In recent years he has been an instructor for the ABA’s Young Birder Conferences, and he views tours as an opportunity for learning as well as simply seeing and appreciating. Steve’s most valued commodity is time—combined with peace and quiet to think, read, and write. His favorite birding site is wherever he is, from simply watching a California Towhee hopping outside his window to seeing a Royal Albatross wheeling in a South Atlantic gale. (He lost the listing bug a few years ago and feels far more peaceful for it.)
Interests beyond birds include butterflies, tequila, and chocolate (the last two come originally from Mexico, which may be no coincidence).