Birding the Wilds of Panama with Erik Bruhnke

Name: Birding the Wilds of Panama with Erik Bruhnke
Start: 2025-10-15T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-10-15T21:00:00-05:00
Location: 1519 Water St, Stevens Point, WI 54481-3548, United States

Schedule

Wed Oct 15 2025 at 07:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

1519 Water St, Stevens Point, WI 54481-3548, United States | Stevens Point, WI

Erik Bruhnke has loved birds since he was a child looking at chickadees. While still a student at Northland College, he taught field ornithology for three semesters, graduating in 2008 with a Natural Resources degree. After graduation, his springs and summers were spent conducting bird surveys through northern forests, vast prairies, and western mountains. He worked as an interpreter for six fall seasons at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory in Duluth, Minnesota; counted migrating raptors at the Corpus Christi HawkWatch in Texas in 2015; and was the 2016, 2017, and 2018 hawk counter at the Cape May Hawkwatch in New Jersey. In the fall of 2020, he educated visitors at the Cape May Hawkwatch. Throughout the past two fall seasons he has assisted in counting bird migration and interpreting the movements of birds to visitors back at Hawk Ridge.
Erik’s wildlife photography has won national awards, and he’s written for the American Birding Association’s Birder’s Guide, BirdWatching magazine, and Bird Watcher’s Digest. Erik is a full-time birding tour guide for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT) as well as his own business, Naturally Avian. He enjoys hiking, kayaking, dips in Lake Superior, cross-country skiing, and being out in the snow. In his free time, he loves to cook and bake.
Come join Erik Bruhnke as he talks about his years of birding and his adventures in Panama’s cloud forests and even the remote Darien Gap—the only roadless stretch along the entire Pan American Highway, from Alaska to Argentina, where the highway disappears. Home to more bird species than any other Central American country, Panama hosts a remarkable array of bird life and so much more, and Erik has led birding tours to some of the finest spots. He’ll share his photos and stories about Harpy Eagles and Purple-crowned Fairies, motmots and tanagers, antbirds and manakins, sloths and monkeys, and many of the wintering birds in Panama that breed right here in central Wisconsin! What is it like to be present among the fascinating nature of this area? Erik will give you a sense-of-place… birds and beyond.
ALAS programs for the 2025-26 season will continue to be hybrid, with the in-person presentation held at the Lincoln Center (1519 Water St., Stevens Point, Wisconsin) and remotely live via Zoom. To view via Zoom, register at https://tinyurl.com/ALAS2025Oct15. Find this link on our website under the Events-Presentation tab.