Meet Patrick O'Driscoll
I joined DFO in 2014, about a year after going on my first organized field trip (Denver Audubon's monthly wetlands walk near Chatfield SP). Before that, I was a solitary, once-in-a-while wannabirder with cheap binoculars, a Sibley's guide and no idea how to begin. I have led DFO trips since October 2016 and for 5 years coordinated the club's "community science" project on nesting colonial waterbirds in several local parks including my "backyard" birding patch, Denver City Park (where I have birded about 750 times). I am also editor of The Lark Bunting, DFO's quarterly journal.
I enjoy bird outings of all kinds (hikes, car "chase trips," overnighters), but the ones I LOVE to lead are to marginal, ordinary places we take for granted -- city parks and scrubby, scruffy destinations on the urban fringe: Denver City Park (abundant birdlife just 1-1/2 miles from downtown), First Creek @ DEN Open Space (diverse birding beneath the busy Peña Boulevard airport highway), the South Platte River (in and out of town), and Heron Pond (in a forgotten, once-polluted corner of old Denver).