Name: Close to the Nest: Birding Hotspots in Montana and the Northwest
Start: 2025-09-08T19:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-09-08T22:00:00-06:00
Location: University of Montana

Close to the Nest: Birding Hotspots in Montana and the Northwest

Please join us for our first monthly chapter meeting of the Fall semester on Monday, September 8, 2025 at 7:00 PM. Our speaker will be Susie Wall, Five Valleys Audubon’s own program coordinator, who will be presenting her talk: Close to the Nest: Birding Hotspots in Montana and the Northwest.
Over the years, Five Valleys Audubon Society has welcomed gifted birders and speakers who have taken us on journeys to faraway lands such as Antarctica, Ireland, and Iceland. During her talk, Susie will take us along on her own birding adventures a little closer to home in Montana, Idaho, and other Northwestern locales. She will talk about what makes birding exciting for her despite her identification skills remaining squarely in the “amateur” status (she recently shouted to the group on a FVA field trip that they should look at the golden eagle overhead, which turned out to be a plane). Through her talk, Susie hopes to help everyone discover at least one new birding destination not far from the nest.
Susie Wall is a freelance journalist in Missoula. She is on the Board of Five Valleys Audubon Society and has served as the Program Coordinator since 2016. Her writing and photography have appeared in numerous publications such as Montana Quarterly, Montana Outdoors, Big Sky Journal, and Distinctly Montana, and she is a regular contributor to Northwest Travel & Life and Missoula Valley Lifestyle. She is the author of the book 100 Things to Do in Montana Before You Die, and is currently working on her second book, Secret Montana: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure. Though travel is her favorite focus, her boundless curiosity has led her to write about subjects ranging from small-scale farming to bird mortality mitigation on the Berkeley Pit to scat identification.
The meeting will be held in Room 110 in the Interdisciplinary Sciences Building (ISB) on the University of Montana campus. The building lies on the south end of campus on Beckwith Avenue between Maurice and Mansfield avenues. You also have the option of watching the meeting over a Zoom link that will be added here when available.