Whimbrel Birders Club was started at the first annual Illinois Young Birders Symposium in August 2016 by Oliver Burrus (founder), Isoo O’Brian (co-founder), Benjamin Sebastain (co-founder), and Eddie Kasper (co-founder) we are all young birders from northern Illinois. Our first walk was in October 2016 when we went to Nelson Lake FP and Fermilab in Batavia, IL. That trip was great as we saw over 60 species and 4 species of geese (pretty good for northern Illinois in October). We are a birding club truly meant for all ages, meaning that we offer walks for anyone 0 to 100. In fact, our motto is “age is not a barrier”.  We make our walks available to everyone including non-members by posting it to IBET (Illinois Birders Exchanging Thoughts) and on our website.

We have started a few competitions like the Whimbrel Patch Birding Competition (WPBC) where trip leaders lead people around their local patches and at the end, I will release which team won (a winter, spring, summer, and fall competition that is projected to start this summer) and the Backyard Migratory Bird Count Competition (BMBCC) is a competition where people bird in their yard for a weekend and submit the counts to the page for the competition on the website (an annual competition in September projected to start this year). We have kept growing our club by starting competitions, offering two or more bird walks a month, and by blogging.