November 2025-January 2026 Speaker Series

For the months of November through March, when weather can be iffy and night comes early, the programs will be via Zoom only. WCAS members, guests and friends are always welcome via Zoom. RSVP via the WCAS Calendar or sign up for the WCAS newsletter to receive the Zoom links.

November Program: “RaptorQuest: Chasing America’s Raptors”
Presenter: Scott Harris, photographer and author
Date & Time: November 4, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom only 
Description: Author Scott Harris will share with us his journey to find all 53 raptors that call the lower 48 states home. In his book, RaptorQuest: Chasing’s America’s Raptors, Scott found all 53 species, along with a Bat Falcon, Steller’s Sea Eagle, and Eurasian Eagle Owl! Scott took 17 months and traveled more than 100,000 miles across 34 states. He’ll share his adventures, misadventures, successes, and failures. From minus 36 degree days, to ones over 100 degrees, to getting stuck in the mud, to barely missing a bird, to just arriving in time. As Scott states, “It’s about the raptors, of course, but it’s also about the people I met, the things I learned and why I’m already in the middle of my next big birding adventure.”

December Program: “View Mother Nature’s Boundless Beauty Through the Eyes of a Photographer”
Presenter: Hal Mitcheltree
Date & Time: Tuesday, December 2, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom only
Description: Delight your eyes, refresh your spirit, and nourish your brain as Hal Mitcheltree guides you on a visual tour of Mother Nature's gifts from the ground up. Learn how to view the world through the eyes of a photographer and discover a handful of simple visual tools that will help you to see much more of the beauty that is silently, patiently hiding in plain sight all around us.

January Program: “How Birds Created the World and Other Stories from The Complete Language of Birds”
Presenter: Randi Minetor, author and freelance writer
Date & Time: Tuesday, January 6, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom only
Description: In conjunction with the release of her latest book, “The Complete Language of Birds,” this presentation delves into mythologies from around the globe, in which people attempted to explain the world around them by casting birds as creatures even more wondrous than they are in real life. Ancient Egyptians believed that the Earth itself was an egg laid by Gengen-Wer, what we know today as the Egyptian Goose. This remarkable bird earned the moniker “Great Shrieker” when its honk became the first sound ever heard on Earth. The Ojibwa people of the northern plains tell of a Great Flood that swept away the world’s evils, and one man who built a raft to save his bird friends. To restart the world after this destruction, the birds needed to bring a bit of soil up from the bottom of the now-deep sea. He recruited a Loon to attempt the dive, but the Loon came back up with no soil. A Dove tried, but he failed as well. Finally, a lone Coot named Aajigade dove to the bottom—and while the effort nearly killed him, he managed to bring back a bill’s worth of mud. The Earth began anew. Athabaskan stories from the southwest portray American Bitterns as heroes that helped end the Great Flood, swallowing large amounts of floodwater and regurgitating it to form rivers where they were needed most.