WELCOME

The 2015 Wings Over Willcox Birding and Nature Festival is scheduled for January 14 – 18, 2015. This year marks the 22nd anniversary of the festival and the committee and staff look forward to celebrating it with you. We have added some new tours and seminars and expanded some of the tours from previous years.

The Wings Over Willcox Birding and Nature Festival, held annually by the Willcox Chamber of Commerce & Agriculture, occurs during the Martin Luther King holiday weekend of January in Willcox, Arizona. The festival has many supporting affiliates, including government agencies, businesses, organizations and interested individuals.

Our festival is the perfect opportunity to see all the winter migrants that visit our area and to see the other wildlife and natural wonders of Southeastern Arizona. Our festival provides opportunities to explore nature in Southeastern Arizona through tours on photography, geology, history, botany, agriculture and the wonderful Sandhill Cranes and other birds of our area. We invite you to take advantage of these opportunities by signing up for tours and seminars. We hope you can join us!

We encourage you to “like” our Facebook page to keep up with the plans for the 2015 festival.

The 22st Anniversary WOW festival is on!  We look forward
to seeing you January 14-18, 2015! 

I am a Professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington. My graduate (Northern Arizona University) and initial post-doctoral (University of Vermont) research focused on the social behavior and ecology of jays and ravens. I was especially interested in communication, social organization, and foraging behavior. My current research brings this behavioral approach to pressing conservation issues including conservation of endangered species, urban ecology, and the varied connections between crows and people. I enjoy blending biology, conservation, and anthropology to suggest that human and crow cultures have co-evolved. My most recent work applies a neurobiological perspective to understand the amazing feats of corvids (crows, ravens, jays and their kin).

Chris is a graphic designer and artist with a 25 year background in pen and ink drawing, oil painting, photography and screen printing. In the 1990s he embraced the computer revolution and developed a way to merge painting and photography in the digital medium. In the tradition of Alfred Stieglitz's "Photo-Secessionist" movement, photographic images are transformed by digital dark room techniques and intense painterly manipulation to create textures and effects that attempt to bridge the unique properties of photography and painting, a process he has dubbed the "painted photo montage". Using these techniques, he created the multi-bird habitat vistas in the celebrated book "The Field Guide to Bird Conservation" published by the American Bird Conservancy.