Rick Wright is our key note speaker this year. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, Alison Beringer. Rick grew up birding in southeast Nebraska and attended the University of Nebraska and Harvard Law School before taking the M.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University. Following a dozen years as an academic, he moved to Tucson in 2003, where he founded Aimophila Adventures, a guide service for birders in southeast Arizona. Now the Managing Director of WINGS, Rick is a widely published writer, a popular lecturer at birding events, and an enthusiastic tour leader in Europe and North America.

Rick Wright is the new Managing Director of WINGS. A native of southeast Nebraska, he started birding at the “classic” age of 13, and has never looked back in the three decades since. He’s never looked back, but he has certainly looked around.
As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, he worked as a collections assistant in the bird range of the State Museum, and served as Teaching Assistant for Ornithology to Paul Johnsgard. With degrees magna cum laude in French and German, Rick at the age of 19 went on to Harvard Law School, but quickly found himself spending more time in the meadows and salt marshes of coastal Massachusetts than in the ivied halls. On a memorable winter visit home to Nebraska, he was in on the discovery of that state’s first Taiga Bean-Goose, an event that convinced him to make a year’s leave from the Law School permanent.
            Having lived in two of the best birding areas in the US, Rick found New Jersey the logical next destination, and enrolled in 1985 in the Graduate School at Princeton University. Intellectually a far better fit than the law, the years spent studying the literary and cultural history of the European Middle Ages at Princeton and in Germany ended with the award of the M.A. and the Ph.D. and a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois. Though the birding in east central Illinois could be surprisingly exciting, it did not present much of a distraction from the life of the library and the mind, and during 10 years at Illinois, including shorter and longer research sojourns in Germany, France, and Poland, Rick published two scholarly books on the transmission of natural history traditions in medieval Latin schoolbooks.
            The birds and birding culture of New Jersey continued to sing their siren song, however, and Rick and his wife, Alison, leapt at the opportunity to return when in 1999 Alison started her own graduate work at Princeton. When not birding everywhere from High Point to Cape May, Rick held an appointment as Reader/Scholar in Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology, with a specialization in medieval sculpture from France and Italy; art historians continue to consult him on the odd question—some odder than others—about ancient and medieval ornithology.
            A year later, Rick was appointed Associate Professor of German and Medieval Studies at Fordham University. Finding that position intellectually unsatisfying, and the long commute between Princeton and “the city” generally birdless and invariably exhausting, he and Alison began to scheme their move to southeast Arizona, a place that had been their favorite vacation destination for well over a decade. Rick resigned from Fordham, accepted a Visiting Scholar appointment in Art History at the University of Arizona, and hung out his shingle as Aimophila Adventures, a one-man guiding and tour service for birders.
            To almost everyone’s surprise, Aimophila Adventures was an immediate success, and Rick was soon guiding visiting birders from around the world to the hotspots and special birds of southeast Arizona. He began lecturing widely and teaching birding courses for clubs and associations in the Tucson area, and expanded his offerings, geographically and intellectually, to include museum-based workshops and tours to several additional sites in North America and Europe. It was in the course of one of those workshops that he and his group discovered Arizona’s first Brown-chested Martin.
            Even during his years of greatest scholarly effort, Rick found time to write short pieces on birds, birding, and birder culture. In 2001, he became Department Editor at Birding magazine, with responsibility for “Sources,” a series of articles exploring the relationship between birds and human culture; he assumed the duties of Sightings Editor in 2006. At the end of 2004, he took on the Editorship of Winging It, a position he relinquished on being named Managing Director of WINGS in 2008. 
            Summarized in these few words, Rick’s career to this point could fairly be described as colorful—though not, rest assured, checkered. The unusual breadth of his experiences has given him equally unusual insights and pronounced opinions, and he looks forward to upholding the WINGS traditions of excellence and excitement while at the same time making innovations that address the ever more sophisticated interests and desires of birders around the world.

Rooted in her childhood passion for exploring wild country, Narca Moore-Craig has forged a triple career in wildlife art, wildlife biology and tour leading, for more than 20 years, to remote destinations worldwide. Narca’s widely-published, award-winning art is steeped in the experience of a lifelong naturalist. Horsefeathers, her contribution to New Mexico’s public art project, Trail of the Painted Ponies, was stabled for a while in the Albuquerque airport and, later, in the rotunda of the Arizona State Capitol.

Her illustrations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Natural History of the Sonoran Desert, The Raptors of North America, A Birder’s Guide to Southeastern Arizona, A Birder’s Guide to the Texas Coast, Guide to Birds of the Anza-Borrego Desert, Guide to Birds of the Salton Sea, and A Guide to Southern Arizona Bird Nests and Eggs. Birding trail maps for southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico feature her art––as has the annual Christmas Bird Count publication (twice!). Narca’s prints, notecards, t-shirts, hand-painted tiles and books may be found at the Chiricahua Gallery in Rodeo, New Mexico, a small outpost at the edge of the art galaxy.

Narca earned a B.A. in Biology from the University of California, Riverside, in order to give greater precision and depth to her wildlife art. While there, she was the first woman to win the Jaeger Award in Field Biology, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was honored as the outstanding woman student of her graduating class. Narca is a past president of Western Field Ornithologists and was recently a member of the Arizona Bird Committee. Narca and her husband Alan Craig live in the shadow of the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona.