How to Know the Birds: Field Craft with Ted Floyd

Join us on a day of exploring birding field craft, and spend some serious quality time with the diverse and fascinating breeding bird community in and around Aspen. Field trips to different birding hotspots will give us direct experience with around 100 species of mainly mountain birds: everything from ridiculously colorful neotropical migrants to behaviorally complex waterfowl to striking raptors to hardy permanent residents of the boreal forest. We will cover the basics of bird identification—with an emphasis on the “whole bird” approach that encourages us to watch birds in a broad ecological context. A major theme will be bird study in the digital age; to that end, we will learn how to contribute our bird sightings to eBird and other citizen-science databases. Field time will be interactive, dynamic, and fun!

Educators, when registering online for this class, please click on scholarship button and write EDUCATOR in the comments field so we can apply additional discount for you. The educators’ discount is for teachers who take ACES classes for their professional development. Educator class cost is $50.

About the Instructor: Ted Floyd is the Editor of Birding magazine, the award-winning flagship publication of the American Birding Association. He has written five bird books, including the Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America (HarperCollins, 2008) and How to Know the Birds (National Geographic, 2019). Ted's newest book is Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada―West, 2nd Edition (National Geographic, 2025). Ted is also the author of more than 200 popular articles, technical papers, and book chapters on birds and nature. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B., 1990) and Penn State University (Ph.D., 1995), Ted has taught biology, math, and statistics to everyone from second graders to advanced graduate students.