Our guiding principles

Welcome, and thank you for choosing The Bird Guide as your pelagic trip provider. It is our goal to offer you a pelagic trip experience superior to any other you have taken. What makes a good pelagic trip? Certainly excellent birds are the foundation. And skilled seabird spotters are important. But there's more. And this is where we at The Bird Guide excel and differentiate ourselves.

The difference that The Bird Guide provides is our customer first priority and commitment. You are our guests and the reason our business exists. From the pre-trip preparation materials through the post-trip report, this is your pelagic trip, and we never forget it.

We want to share with you our excitement and wonder of this truly unique birding habitat. Thus, on every trip, we strive to tell you about the oceanography of the places we visit, and how that relates to bird distribution and abundance. Seabirds are uniquely adapted to their environment, so we make a special effort to inform you of their interesting life histories.

The identification of birds at sea does not allow a feather-by-feather examination with today's high-powered optics. Instead, we teach you a new way to identify birds. We want you to identify for yourself the birds you are seeing. Therefore we really work with you in describing the different shapes, flight-styles, and behaviors that allow you to accurately identify distant or fast-flying seabirds from the unstable platform of the boat. Our goal is that by the end of the trip you will be calling out the identifications of a dozen species of seabirds that you've never seen before, and come to have an informed appreciation about their lives and marine environment.

Our guides: All our professional guides are trained and dedicated to make sure you see and identify as many species of seabirds and marine mammals as possible. This is your pelagic trip, and we never forget it.

Greg Gillson founded The Bird Guide, Inc. in 1994, and serves as president, secretary, marketer, web master, and pelagic guide. He has organized and led over 110 West Coast pelagic trips through 2006. In addition, he has attended dozens of other pelagic trips off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America and off western Mexico. Greg began birding in 1972 for a junior high school science project and never stopped. He enjoys teaching others about birds--both their identification and natural history. He has volunteered for shorebird and Marbled Murrelet surveys. He served on the steering committee of the Oregon Breeding Bird Atlas Project (1995-1999). Greg contributed more than a dozen seabird accounts to the 2003 book, Birds of Oregon: A General Reference. He enjoys birding the Cascade Mountains and enjoys the challenging groups of birds, such as Empidonax flycatchers, shorebirds, gulls, and (of course) seabirds. He is adept at identifying Western birds by their calls and songs. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, and works as an electronics technician at Tektronix in Beaverton.

Tim Shelmerdine, co-leader, began birding in 1985, and was hooked on pelagic birds since his first trip that year. He has spent over 200 days on the ocean, having worked as a deck hand on a fishing boat and having taken over 120 pelagic trips in the Pacific Ocean, from Alaska to Peru, as well as trips in the Atlantic. He has had photographs published in Oregon Birds and Birding and is a contributor to Birds of Oregon: A General Reference and the Oregon Breeding Bird Atlas. Tim has served Oregon Field Ornithologists as board member, secretary and multiple terms as president. He has birded extensively throughout North America, and has experience birding in Mexico and Middle America, South America and Europe. When not birding, Tim teaches Spanish at Lakeridge High School in Lake Oswego, coaches high school sports, leads field trips of the Audubon Society of Portland, works as a part-time bird guide, and may occasionally be found at his home in West Linn.

Tom Snetsinger joined The Bird Guide in 2000. As a child, Tom was introduced to birding under the tutelage of his mother, an avid world birder. He rediscovered the joy of birding in the Seattle area in 1988. Since then he has lived and worked in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Hawaii, and Arkansas. Tom is an ornithologist whose primary interest is endangered species biology. Highlights of his birding career include co-leading the Hawaii Rare Bird Search Team and a six-month stint in southeastern Arkansas searching for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. He has participated in nearly 100 pelagic trips through 2006, primarily in the waters off Hawaii and Oregon. Tom now lives in Brownsville, Oregon, where he leads a long-term demography study on the northern Spotted Owl in the Oregon Coast Range.

Troy Guy is a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researching pelagic distribution of seabirds and marine mammals. He is especially interested in the foraging ecology of Sooty Shearwaters and Common Murres off the Pacific Northwest coast. He spends many days each year at sea observing pelagic seabirds from research ships or while fishing from the Bering Sea to Mexico. Troy joined The Bird Guide, Inc. as a guide in 2001.

Russ Namitz began birding in earnest in the summer of 1996. He has worked as a seasonal wildlife biologist for 7 years in many of the western states from Texas to Alaska as well as in Mexico, Costa Rica & Ecuador. Highlights include working with Kemp's Ridley Seaturtles (TX), conducting demographic studies of all three subscpecies of Spotted Owl (CA,AZ), counting the world's largest raptor migration in Veracruz (MX), and being a bird guide/naturalist on St. Paul Island (AK) and at Sacha Lodge, Ecuador. He has traveled & birded extensively in the western US, Mexico & Central America and has also birded in South America & Asia. He has taken numerous pelagic trips from Alaska to Mexico as well as some east coasts pelagic trips (NC, FL). To feed the obsession, he teaches Biology, Oceanography & Ornithology at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay. Russ joined The Bird Guide in 2007.

Stephen Shunk fledged as a birder in the Santa Clara Valley in the late 1980s, and his addiction to pelagic birding began with regular trips to the Farallon Islands. Steve founded his own birding guide company, Paradise Birding, in 1992, and today he leads birding tours throughout the Western U.S. In 2001, Steve co-founded the Oregon Birding Trails Project, later serving as project coordinator for the Oregon Cascades Birding Trail. Steve co-founded the East Cascades Bird Conservancy in 2002, and he now coordinates various field studies for the ECBC. In his spare time, Steve is writing the Peterson Reference Guide to the Woodpeckers of North America while tending his small five-acre ranchette east of Sisters with his wife, Kris Falco, three horses, two kitties and a coop of egg-laying chickens.

Phil Pickering started birding in 1981, concentrating on travel and birding exploration of many areas off the beaten path in Oregon. Phil has participated in about 30 pelagic trips through 2003, all off Oregon. In addition, he has over 1000 hours of ocean seabird scoping from shore in Oregon, and is creating a database on nearshore migratory movements off the central Oregon coast. Phil has a background in photography, with extensive experience photographing birds. He currently resides in Lincoln City, where he has a business selling baseball cards.

Jamie Simmons began birding as a teenager in 1969 in upstate New York. From 1975 to 1985, he birded while working at Denali National Park, Alaska and traveling in Mexico and Central America. After teaching in eastern Oregon, he moved to Corvallis in 1991. Jamie served four years on the board of the Audubon Society of Corvallis and enjoyed doing fieldwork for the Oregon Breeding Bird Atlas Project. Several of his photographs have appeared in Oregon Birds and Western Birds. Jamie has been attending pelagic trips since 1990. He works as a technical writer for Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis.