[Bristol-Birds] Chris O'Bryan in flight to Kenya

From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Bristol-birds" <bristol-birds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:31:20 -0500
By the time most of us awake Monday morning, Chris O'Bryan, a graduate 
student and long-time birder with the Bristol Bird Club, will have arrived by 
plane at Washington D.C. on the first leg of his trip to Kenya in southeast 
Africa.

He is headed out to join a group of researchers from the Smithsonian Museum
and the Moscow Zoo, who are conducting field work not far from Nairobi. 
Chris will be on the trip until March 9.

He will leave Washington late Monday on a flight to Amsterdam and then board 
the next leg to Nairobi.

The trip is a personal invitation from the Smithsonian group who also took him 
along on a boat trip up the Amazon, several years ago.  He had met Ed Smith of
the museum's staff at an international herpetological symposium in Baltimore.
Smith has become a mentor for a number of herpetological opportunities for 
Chris.

Chris will catch up with Smith and his colleagues and spend the day in the 
Mombasa 
area. Then Smith and Chris will fly to Nairobi.  They will travel by ground to 
the 
Soysambu Conservancy for two days in the Rift Valley then to the Ol Pejeta 
conservancy for three days (March 2-5). They will spend time around the 
conservancy
and eventually fly home on March 8. 

Smith is in the region taking part in field work with biologists from the 
Moscow Zoo, one 
of the largest Moscow scientific and educational organizations.

Also with Chris and Smith will be Ryan Valdez, a Smithsonian fellow out of 
George Mason 
University, studying black rhino landscape conservation, more specifically 
trophic-level 
responses of anthropogenic disturbances. Smith will assist Valdez with 
transects in 
addition to seeing the reserve first hand with Chris.

Smith is a talented naturalist and has considerable skill with birds, plants, 
herptiles,
mammals and many other taxa.  This will be an amazing opportunity and experience
for Chris as well as a great introduction to a different scale of 
landscape-conservation 
research and how organisms respond to human-impacted landscapes. 

The Bristol Bird Club is funding a portion of his expenses from the club's Lee 
R. 
Herndon Memorial Mentoring Fund.

Chris is currently employed as a graduate assistant in wildlife biology at 
Clemson University in the School of Agriculture, Forest, and Environmental 
Sciences and studying for his Masters of Science.
He is an outstanding herpetologist and naturalist who grew up living in Shady 
Valley and Piney Flats of Northeast Tennessee.  His parents live at Piney 
Flats.Wallace CoffeyBristol, TN
[Bristol-Birds] Chris O'Bryan in flight to Kenya

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