Kimball Garrett
January 2000 Winter Bird Festival
Keynote Speaker

His talk will be "A Peek at the Future of California Birding". The dawning of the new millennium seems like an opportune time to ponder the future of birds and birding in California. What trends are we likely to see with our bird populations, and how will birders and ornithologists learn about them? Will yesterday's rarities be commonplace in the future? Will common birds of today be gone tomorrow? Will the splitters or the lumpers prevail? Kimball promises to take a lighthearted look at the subject.

Kimball has been the Ornithology Collections Manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County since 1982. A lifelong Californian, he has birded actively in the state for over thirty years and has also traveled widely. He and Jon Dunn co-authored "Birds of Southern California: Status and Distribution" in 1981; they have also produced several works on bird identification, including the Peterson Field Guide to Warblers of North America. Kimball is a long-serving member of the California Bird Records Committee and is also on the American Birding Association's Checklist Committee. He is the recent past president of Western Field Ornithologists. Among his research interests are the patterns of establishment and ecology of naturalized populations of non-native ("exotic") birds in urban California and various aspects of the field identification, status, distribution, and geographical variation of the birds of California and adjacent regions. He and his wife, ornithologist Kathy Molina, live in La Crescenta.