David and Susan Yee and Tim Manolis brought their 10-year-old idea for a regional bird club and festival to life when the first Board meeting was convened in 1997. After planning meetings in Davis, Lodi, Granite Bay, and Sacramento in the summer of that year, the club was officially formed that fall. The founding members included David, Tim, Waldo Holt, Bruce Webb, John Trochet, Sid England, Ted Beedy, Joan Humphries, and Terry Ronnenberg. The late John Schick drew up the legal papers and helped set up non-profit status.
The impetus for a regional bird club was based on a general lack of attention to this large and biologically diverse area that existed away from the coast. A regional club would add value to the local Central Valley Audubon chapters and would promote a better understanding of the importance of the Central Valley to California’s rich avifauna. There was also the idea of a bird festival in the winter, when the Central Valley is filled with waterfowl and shorebirds arriving on the Pacific Flyway. From those ideas the Central Valley Bird Club arose. The goals of the club were “…dedicated to the study of the distribution, status, ecology, and conservation of the birds in the Central Valley of California”, and those goals remain the same today.
The first symposium was held at Delta Junior College in Stockton from December 4-7, 1997; Kenn Kaufman was the first key-note speaker. One hundred and sixty people attended, and local volunteers led field trips and ran the program. The next year the symposium moved to the Stockton Hilton Hotel, where it is still being held. Frances Oliver first started her long association with the symposium in 1998, a run that continued until 2022.
The first Central Valley Birds was published in January 1998, with Tim Manolis the first editor, with assistance from Bruce Webb. It included articles about tracking Swainson’s Hawk migration, Tricolored Blackbirds, Flammulated Owls, the first occurrence of a Wood Thrush in the Central Valley, with a field note about a Sage Sparrow sighting. The journal continues to be published quarterly, the first such regional scientific publication by a bird club in California. Dan Airola became the editor in 2012 after serving as Tim’s associate editor for 8 years. At the same time, Frances Oliver became the layout editor for the publication.
Now in its 28th year, the Central Valley Birding Symposium is still going strong. With keynote speakers, a bird ID panel, scientific presentations, and field trips, the event has served to inform and entertain participants while still retaining its family feel.
One of the club’s most popular projects is sponsoring young birders for national summer birding camps. The first scholarship was awarded in 2003 for a banding workshop at San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Station. Sebastian Lawler, 13, from Davis, was the first of many recipients who have benefited from the generosity of the club’s membership.
In 2022, the Board added two scholarships to university or graduate students who were conducting research in the Central Valley. These $1500 grants from the Waldo Holt Conservation Fund are again funded by the generosity of club members and contribute to the understanding and conservation of Central Valley birds.
The club is now in its 29th year and is still actively playing a part in the conservation of Central Valley birds and the education of birders far and wide.