Let’s Go Birding

i have been a fan of Lisa’s since she first started leading birding tours for Los Gatos Birdwatcher (then The Wildbird Center of Los Gatos), owned and operated by John and Freddie Howell. From the start, I loved her approach to leading birding tours. She located the birds wherever she lead us, helped us how to ID the bird, explaining the details that brought her the that particular ID, why it wasn’t something else. Her trips are always super organized. No detail overlooked (that is why she acquired a retired portable toilet to take along on her tours). Her mission seems to be to tach others how to bird, where to look, and love the process. She doesn’t ever make one feel like an idiot. Extremely important to me because, sometimes, I feel like one.
I’ve been birding since 1993, but prefer to take a trip with Lisa and Let’s Go Birding than any other group.
Karl

Being beginner birders we were excited to finally hire a professional guide for some birding. On a recent trip to the San Francisco area to visit family we were referred to Let’s Go Birding by the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory’s main guide. We did not know the area well outside the city and wanted not only a professional guide to help us spot birds but to help us know where to go to see them.
We couldn’t have asked for a better guide than owner Lisa Myers.
She came by and picked us up from my sister’s in Livermore and we headed out into the canyons and countryside for a day we’ll not soon forget. Our day was planned including transportation, borrowed field glasses and end of the day checklists and maps to help us remember where we were and what we saw. Lisa told us from the start that since it was summer and hot we may not be able to see a ton of birds but she would do her best to help us see some we couldn’t back in Texas. She kept her word.
I won’t go into all the birds we saw or the tiny details of our birding adventure.
What I will post here is the fantastic personality Lisa had. She was funny and picked up on our senses of humor right away and we laughed and joked and felt as though we knew her from the moment we shook hands that morning. To feel that comfortable with a total stranger that quickly made the trip even better.
She brought along several different binoculars for us to try. As beginners we have fairly cheap field glasses so this was a huge plus for us. She wielded an amazing scope finder that helped us to zero in on birds so close it was as though we were able to touch them. She was very knowledgeable about them being an optics tester for Nikon.
She managed to locate more birds than we could possibly had hoped and explained how we could identify them and what family of birds they are from and how habitat and movement could help us identify them more quickly. Up until now we had frantically thumbed through our guide books and usually missed the correct ID. Now we have more ammo to help us when we are on our own again. She could spot something new by site and sound that seemed almost super human to us. What a wonderful education we got on how to actual go birding.
We couldn’t have asked for better company or a more professional beginning birder guide and teacher.
While we went as a private tour… just Katherine, me and Lisa… I understand she offers large group tours. She even has a portable bathroom she hauls on bigger trips which would be a HUGE plus in certain remote areas. Hiring a professional guide like we did isn’t cheap. But the $ 400 we spent on an all day guided tour with transportation and the newly acquired knowledge we walked away with from her instinctual birding recall was well worth the expense.
We’re already planning our next trip here and may make it a two day tour to include shore birds and a better time of year for migration and viewing.