Board Members

 

 

Kayleigh Hall (Chair) is a south Georgia birder who has volunteered with JIBS and PANO for the last five years. She is a sub-permitted bird bander under Charlie Muise and is part of the team that co-manages PANO. In addition to her volunteer work with JIBS and PANO, she volunteers at the Whigg Meadow Banding Station in Tennesee and participates in Breeding Bird Survey Routes and Christmas Bird Counts in Georgia every year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Muise (Vice Chair) didn’t discover his fascination with birds until he took a field Ornithology class with Dr. Dan Holliman in college. He helped with a Christmas Bird Count in 1990. In 1991, he visited a bird banding station for the first time. The following summer, he took a week-long banding class. Since then, he has banded over 40,000 birds of over 120 species. In 2006 Charlie started the the Panoloa Mountain State Park Banding Station which is the longest-running year-round banding station in Georgia. In addition to year-round banding of grassland birds, he has conducted radio telemetry studies of Loggerhead Shrikes, studied migrating Northern Saw-Whet Owls in Georgia and assisted with several other projects. He began assisting at the Whigg Meadow Banding Station in 2002 and at JIBS in 2006. Charlie has taught banding skills to many people and currently supervises 11 sub-permitees in 4 states.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meghann McLeroy (Treasurer) has been a birder for over 15 years, and was introduced to bird banding at JIBS on a field trip in 2021. Since then, she has logged over 500 volunteer hours at various banding stations around Georgia, Tennesee, and Florida, including JIBS, PANO, Whigg Meadow and GGC Bird Banding Lab. She Started banding birds herself in 2024, and is at over 800 birds banded, including her first hawk!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betsy Rogers (Secretary) is a science communicator and artist. She got her start working with birds as a interpreter, keeper, and handler at the Alaska Raptor Center. Since then she has banded Saw-Whet Owls and raptors in Ontario, Saw-Whet, Boreal, and Northern Hawk-Owls in Alaska, and songbirds in Georgia, Florida,and Tennessee.  She has a B.S. in Biology from Armstrong Atlantic State University and and M.S. in Outdoor and Environmental Education from Alaska Pacific University. She has been volunteering with Jekyll Island Banding Station since 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick Maurice was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from the University of Georgia with a Wildlife Science degree in 2021. Patrick is a lifelong birder thanks to his mother and has birded extensively across the United States and around the world. Patrick currently works as a guide for Natural Habitat Adventures and regularly guides for other birding festivals such as the Biggest Week, Georgia Birdfest, and the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival. He also enjoys participating in birding big days and is part of the team that set Georgia’s big day record in 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Kimberly has been interested in birds for most of her adult life. But she took a deep dive into birding and bird research after she retired from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention where she was a Research Chemist. She signed up for Georgia Audubon’s Master Birder class where she met Charlie Muise and learned that he operated bird banding stations in Georgia. She had previously been on several Operation Rubythroat expeditions to Central America with Dr. Bill Hilton where she had participated in net monitoring and recording data for neotropical migrants. She was keen to get more involved with bird research, so she began volunteering with Charlie at Joe Kurz W

MA and at Panola Mountain. That led to volunteering at the Jekyll Island Banding Station and doing some seasonal volunteering (“salty sparrows”) with Tim Keyes at Georgia DNR.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heather Pitman and Evan Pitman (Past Chair)