Friday, August 6:

9:00am - 12:00; (Meet in the Super 8 motel parking lot - car pool) Pre-workshop field trip for those who come in on Thursday night and want to jumpstart their shorebird I.D. skills. It will also be a chance to visit some of the locations that we will be using during the weekend and orient ourselves with the area.

1:00pm - 2:00pm; (Super 8 motel; downstairs meeting room) Registration / Orientation / General information for the weekend.

2:00pm - 3:00pm; Our first classroom session will deal with the basic techniques that are unique to finding shorebirds and getting ourselves into the right location with the right equipment to make accurate identification possible.

3:00pm - 7:00pm; Field trip - car pool. All of our field trips will focus on getting us very close to as many species of shorebird as possible. Good close looks in good lighting will be our most important tool to learning and identification.

Saturday, August 7:

8:00am - 12:00; (Meet in the Super 8 motel parking lot - car pool) Field trip. We want lots of birds; lots of species; and as close as possible. "Every minute spent away from shorebirds during this weekend is considered a wasted minute".

12:30pm - 2:30pm; Our noon lunch (included in the workshop fee) will be catered into our meeting room at the Super 8 motel. This will be a "working lunch". The title says it all; "ID Without Field Marks". During this classroom session, we will be looking at the clues to identification that are not shown in the standard field guides. It will take us beyond them and into some of the most recent work being done by the field experts around the world on shorebird identification.

2:30pm - 5:00pm; Field trip - car pool. This trip will be where we get serious about identification. The trip will focus on separating the most difficult to identify pairs of shorebird species. We will be working on the fine points of plumage, feeding habits, and "jizz" that can make an accurate identification possible.

7:00pm - 8:00pm: (Meet at the Pizza Ranch on Main St. - back room) We will study the identification field marks of the full range of species that occur in this area. It will also be a session titled "Separating the Tough Ones" that starts to focus on the more difficult identification problems associated with specific species.

Sunday, August 8:

8:00am - 9:00am; (Meet at the Super 8 motel meeting room) Shorebirds make distinctive sounds and we will be looking at some of these during this classroom session. We will also recap the work we have done during the entire workshop. It will be a time to address any individual problems that still exist.

9:00am - 12:00; The final field trip and a great chance to use the skills that we have acquired during the shorebird workshop weekend.