Michael Retter

Guide

Fort Worth, Texas, USA

Michael was raised by three previous generations of central Illinoisans to have a deep appreciation of nature, but he took it a step further. His mom distinctly remembers being woken up at six o’clock on a Saturday morning by a seven-year-old who demanded she get out of bed to take a photograph of the Rose-breasted Grosbeaks in the front yard. His dad is fond of telling the story of him bolting out of the farmhouse, shoeless, after his first Bald Eagle on a snowy January day.

Michael is current Editor of the American Birding Association’s Birder’s Guide magazine. He also puts his penchant for the “correct” grammar and his interest in the minutiae of bird identification, taxonomy, and distribution to use as a s Technical Reviewer for Birding magazine.

He took regular road trips with friends into Mexico during holiday vacations during college. The birds, culture, and (particularly Oaxacan) cuisine proved so addictive that he has been tourleading there ever since. In addition to Mexico, Michael has led or participated in trips to Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, The Bahamas, Ecuador, Venezuela, the USA, Canada, Australia, Micronesia, the Northern Marianas, and Palau. His area of focus is still northern Middle American (Mexico and northern Central American), and he is currently writing a field guide to the birds of the area.

In 2002 Michael received a B.A. in Biology from Illinois Wesleyan University, where he also studied classical voice as a music minor. During and after college, he worked five consecutive seasons with the National Forest Service and the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory on their Monitoring Birds of the Black Hills project. It’s a beautiful area he never tires of visiting. He spent a summer monitoring birds in Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest, worked for the State of Indiana on its Breeding Bird Atlas and bat monitoring projects, and has worked as a field biologist for environmental consulting firms at various wind farm projects in Illinois and Indiana. He is a past Chair and current member of the Indiana Bird Records Committee and helps review ebird records from Illinois and Indiana. Michael runs GBNA, the continent’s email list and informal club for LGBT birders. In that capacity he has helped organize and run four biennial group meetings, inducing one to Chiapas, Mexico

Michael currently lives with his fiancé, Matt, in Fort Worth Texas. In his free time there, he pursues interests in horticulture (especially orchids), music, cooking, and numismatics. Whether it’s birding, flowers, or food, Michael gets the greatest pleasure out of sharing experiences with others.