For decades, the ABA's Birders Exchange program has worked to collect donated new and used equipment

and to distribute it to local researchers and conservationists working to conserve birds and their habitats throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

This December helped celebrate that legacy in beautiful Honduras at an ABA Birders Exchange rally with birders exchange recipients, local guides,

and ABA staff.

Come birding in the tropics with the ABA this December.

A few spots are still available.

Get more information at events.a.org. Hello and welcome to another episode of the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association.

I am your host Nate Swick, and like a lot of you, I'm sure I've been following the news during and after the landfill of Hurricane Harvey along the

Gulf Coast of Texas. It has been jaw-dropping the power of that storm, the rainfall

associated with it. Many, many birders are weather geeks in addition to being bird geeks.

So there's a lot of room for overlap there, especially this time of years. We come

to fall in migration and how the movements of birds are very much associated with weather

conditions. So all my social media feeds have blown up in the past week or two about hurricanes

and birds. This particular storm has had a couple obvious ties to birding and birders.

For starters, the area affected the upper Texas coast is very well known as one of the best places on the continent to experience migration, especially spring migration.

It's not clear what is going to happen to those birding sites, that whole rock port up to Beaufort area,

has taken a real beating.

Who knows what that habitat is going to look like once the water recedes and we get in there to take stock?

I think that the environmental impacts have taken a backseat to the human element of this storm,

and rightly so at this point.

But in addition to the water and wind damage,

there's also the potential for chemical damage, lots of petroleum, refinery, manufacturing

...