 | ||
 | | |
Rich Hoyer has been guiding birders professionally for eleven years, first as a seasonal guide on Saint Paul Island in Alaska's Pribilofs, and then as a full-time leader for WINGS for the past ten years. He first started birding at the age of 14, having always maintained an interest in all things creeping, crawling, flying, and blooming. Combining a love of languages and natural history, Rich Hoyer completed a double major in German and Zoology at Oregon State University. After graduation in 1994, he followed up on this combo by working as a biotechnician on studies of bird foraging and habitat use in southeastern Arizona, western Oregon, and western Russia. He also gained experience banding birds for four months at the Big Sur Ornithology Lab in California and for a month on the little island of Greifswalder Oie off the Baltic coast of Germany, where during one fallout day, the 8 banders marked over 1000 birds. There he also helped document the first Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state records of Siberian Chiffchaff and Siberian Stonechat. And although Rich now spends more time speaking Spanish and Portuguese, Germans still say "he speaks like a native." His first professional guiding job during the summers of 1996 and 1997 was as a natural history interpreter on St. Paul Island in Alaska's Pribilofs, where he guided birding groups, explained the life history of the Northern Fur-Seal to German tourists and discovered North America's first Chinese Pond-Heron. He has been a field leader for WINGS since September 1997. Rich's first field guide was Reader's Digest Book of North American Wildlife, which he mostly used for wildflowers, trees, butterflies, sea shells, and reptiles. Figuring out the Plain Titmouse from the book's Tufted Timouse account was his first birding breakthough at the age of 14. Today he is fascinated by bird biogeography including changes in bird distribution patterns and enjoys working on his personal library of bird sound recordings. He tapes many other sounds from nature as well, ranging from rain forest frogs and mammals to underwater fish. Rich's favorite birds are hummingbirds, and he especially likes showing people the stunning Black-hooded Sunbeam, a Bolivian endemic. But the male Snowcap, Horned Sungem, and Calliope Hummingbird (his all-time favorite) qualify for runners-up.. Rich Hoyer first came out at home when he was 12, then to the rest of the world starting at age 20 during his year of study abroad in Freiburg, Germany. At Oregon State University, while pursuing his undergraduate degrees, he also acted as Secretary/Treasurer and Co-Director of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alliance on campus. Since graduating in 1994, he has focused on his career as a biologist and birding tour leader and has remained faithfully out of the closet and open to anyone who cares to notice. Today when Rich is at home between tours in Tucson, Arizona, he sings English madrigals with a group of friends and occasionally makes use of his several years of piano lessons. He also loves to garden and bake bread (skills from his mother), and will rarely miss an opportunity to catch a lizard or snake (influence from his father). When leading tours, Rich also enjoys pointing out butterflies and discussing plants, provided of course, there's a break in the birding |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
ABOUT THE LEADER PAST TOUR REPORTS LINKS: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | | | | | | | | ||||||||||||||||
