FEATURED SPEAKERS
Bill Thompson III is the editor/co-publisher of
Bird Watcher’s Digest, America’s longest-running popular magazine for
birders. He’s the author of numerous books, including Bird Watching For
Dummies, Identify Yourself: The 50 Most Common Bird Identification
Challenges, Identifying & Feeding Birds, and the just-published Young
Birder’s Guide to Birds of North America. He writes a weekly blog, Bill of
the Birds and hosts a podcast called This Birding Life. Bill regularly
speaks, guides, and performs at birding festivals across North America,
consults internationally on ecotourism marketing, and has watched birds in
47 states and 28 countries. In his spare time, he’s the leader of the
country-rock band The Rain Crows.
Marshall Iliff, born in Maryland, started birding at age 11 and
attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, from 1993-1997. After college,
Marshall criss-crossed the continent on various field jobs (including four
months studying bird migration on an oil platform off New Orleans) before
taking a job as a professional tour guide for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours.
His travels included visits to all 50 states, as well as Mexico, Panama,
Belize, Greenland, and Kenya. In 2007 Marshall was hired by the Cornell Lab
of Ornithology as the third eBird Project Leader. Since then, the project
has enjoyed significant growth, has expanded worldwide and has developed an
eBird website specific to Maine (among other states). Among the most
exciting projects has been seeing the millions of birdwatcher observations
come together using new modeling techniques that show animated maps of bird
migration, species-by-species, at the continental scale. Marshall lives with
his wife and two dogs in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, gets out eBirding
whenever he is not behind the computer.
