On a Wing and a Prayer: AMB Class #1 - Galapagos Trumps Class!

Woohoo! I got into the AMB program!

But wait. You already knew that. Or else this was going to be a very short blog.

So that takes us to Class #1.

The program is very structured, with a calendar of Monday night classes (27 of them in all) and 30 Saturday field trips (if you include all the testing trips). There are all kinds of other requirements, but the classes and field trips make up the bulk of the program, with a requirement that you attend 75% of these sessions.

So you might imagine my concern, at the end of my interview – when I thought I had the thing pegged – and I had to say: Um, there’s one little problem, and it’s that I’ll have to miss the first class.

In the abstract, that just seems like bad mojo. Really, you have to miss the first class?

But when I told this to my interviewers, adding the explanation “because I’ll be in the Galapagos on a trip I’ve been planning for nearly two years”, the Audubon folks didn’t miss a beat. Almost in unison, they said, “Galapagos trumps the first class!”

So that’s where I was when the rest of my class – twelve of us in total – met for the first time on Monday, July 29. They were doing introductions, and reviewing class schedules and requirements, and getting books handed out (both loaners and required texts supplied by the program). They all got The Notebook: I’ll have much more on this later. And heaven knows what else they got, and what else they learned, and what all I missed.

But I was off in the Pacific, seeing incredible birds. Did I feel bad about missing that class? Of course. But did the trip to the Galapagos (and add to that a day in the cloud forest of Ecuador) trump the first class? Well, I'll let you be the judge. Here are some of the birds I was seeing while I was off, missing Class #1: