Gary Rosenberg

Gary Rosenberg grew up on Long Island, New York, where he was introduced to birdwatching by his father, who himself has been an avid birdwatcher since childhood. Every year the family would take a month-long vacation focused on birding (Gary’s brother, Ken, was also a birdwatcher), and by the time he graduated from high school in 1975, Gary had traveled to nearly every state and province in North America. Some of his early childhood birding memories include driving up Mt. Pinos in California to see California Condors; birding Central Park (his father had a store on Madison Avenue), where he saw his first Cerulean Warbler; and birding on Bonaventure Island in Quebec, where he saw an Atlantic Puffin (to this day the only one he’s seen!).

Gary spent one year at Oswego State College, N.Y., studying business administration, with minor aspirations of being a professional golfer. Oswego is not the best place to live if one is interested in golf, but the birdwatching proved to be exciting. On weekends he often hitchhiked to Ithaca to visit his brother, Ken, at Cornell or birded along Lake Ontario at sites such as Derby Hill. He can still remember walking to class on the campus at Oswego and watching large numbers of raptors migrating east along the lake. After a year of struggling in classes such as economics and calculus, Gary left the frigid north and followed his parents to south Florida, where they had retired. Living and working on a golf course renewed Gary’s desire to excel at golf, but at the same time, he became an even more serious birder. It took Gary about a year to realize that his interest in birds was greater than his skill on the golf course, and by that time Ken had graduated from Cornell and was censusing birds on the Colorado River in Arizona. When Ken started graduate school at Arizona State University, Gary traveled from Florida to Arizona for a visit … and stayed.

After working in Arizona for a year, Gary enrolled at Arizona State University, graduating with a B.S. in zoology in 1981. While in Arizona he became more involved in the birding community and was heavily influenced by the likes of Kenn Kaufman, Scott Terrill and Jon Dunn. He also made his first ventures into the Neotropics with birding trips into Mexico to San Blas and Palenque. It soon became clear to Gary that tropical birding was his calling, and he began to follow the exploits of Ted Parker, who had left Arizona for Louisiana State University a few years earlier. It became a dream of Gary’s to follow in Ted’s footsteps and go to graduate school at LSU to study birds in Peru.

In 1981 Gary was accepted into a master’s program at LSU. During the summer of 1982 he participated in his first research expedition to Amazonian Peru, where he spent three months in field camps studying the habitat requirements and behavior of Amazonian birds. In 1983 Gary returned to northeastern Peru to conduct fieldwork for his master’s thesis, “The Habitat Use and Foraging Behavior of River Island Birds in Amazonia.” By the time he received his master’s degree from LSU in 1985, he had participated in four research expeditions to remote areas in Amazonian and Andean Peru. Joining the job market, he studied wintering Kirtland’s Warblers in the Bahamas for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1985 and censused birds and mammals in the mountains of southern Wyoming for the U.S. Forest Service in 1986.

In 1986 Gary contacted several birdwatching tour companies, and WINGS expressed a serious interest. Gary led his first tour for WINGS in the spring of 1986 and began full-time leading in January 1987, taking up residence in Tucson the same year. During the early 1990s Gary continued his interest in research by participating on a few expeditions with the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences to Ecuador. On one these trips he was involved in the discovery of a new species of cotinga, which he and Mark Robbins named after their major professor at LSU, Van Remsen. Since his return to Arizona, Gary has become a co-editor for North American Birds (formerly American Birds) and is secretary of the Arizona Bird Records Committee. His love of the Southwest has prompted him to develop tours to southeastern Arizona, northern Arizona and Utah. His love of the tropics takes him to Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru on an annual basis. During the summer he leads tours in Alaska, escaping the brutal Arizona heat. In recent years Gary has become passionate about digital photography through a telescope (digiscoping), and many of his photos appear on the WINGS web site. Gary still plays golf (not as much as he would like) and is an avid moviegoer.

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WINGS Tour Leaders – Gary Rosenberg

Gary Rosenberg

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