York County Audubon invites the community to a special program at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, September 15th, when Doug Hitchcox will present an entertaining program about a birding trip around the island of Jamaica. This program will be held in the Mather Auditorium at the Wells Reserve and will also be live-streamed via Zoom.
In March 2026, Maine Audubon led a birding tour to Jamaica, one of the hotbeds of avian endemism in the West Indies with at least 28 species that can be found there and nowhere else. This week long tour visited some of the best known birding locations on the island, from the forests in the Blue Mountains National Park to the famous feeders at Rocklands Bird Sanctuary, and of course no trip is complete without a trip to the local sewage ponds! Just five months before the trip, Hurricane Melissa made a “catastrophic landfall” in Jamaica that caused unprecedented destruction.
Join us to hear Doug Hitchcox, Maine Audubon’s Staff Naturalist and one of the guides on the Jamaica trip, recounting the trip with a focus on the birds, how they adapted to hurricane damage, plus culinary and cultural highlights! This will be a fun program for anyone planning their own trip or hoping to bird vicariously through the stories, and you’ll get the latest scoop on what tours are coming next.
Doug is the Staff Naturalist for Maine Audubon. In his free time, Doug is one of Maine’s eBird reviewers, owner and moderator of the ‘Maine-birds’ listserv, and member of the Maine Bird Records Committee. He also served as the Outreach Coordinator for the Maine Bird Atlas, and writes a regular nature column for the Portland Press Herald.
This program will be presented at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 15th, in the Mather Auditorium at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm. The entrance to the parking area is off Skinner Mill Road in Wells. It will be free and open to all ages, and no registration is required for attending the program in person. It will also be live-streamed via Zoom. To view it via Zoom, you’ll need to register in advance. To do so, please go to this event on our website, www.yorkcountyaudubon.org, and click on the registration link in the post for this event. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
We hope you can join us for this entertaining and inspiring presentation, either in person, or, if not, via Zoom!
