Skip to main content

Membership Offer Includes Discount With Legendary Tour Guide

Swallow-tailed Gull, GalapagosHere at the Cornell Lab we’ve been lucky to have a close relationship with legendary bird tour operator Victor Emanuel for many years. He’s a longtime board member, and several of our staff have served as guides on his expeditions, including our director, John Fitzpatrick, eBird co-project leaders Chris Wood and Brian Sullivan, and Merlin project leader Jessie Barry.

Now we’ve teamed up with Victor to offer discounts on VENT tours for people who become members. (Note: this offer expired in 2011.) If you join the Cornell Lab and you’ve never been on a VENT tour before, you’ll get $300 off the cost of your first trip. Membership in the Cornell Lab starts at $35.

Or perhaps you’ve been eyeing the Galapagos Islands, home to marine iguanas, the world’s northernmost penguins, and the most famous finches on the planet? If you sign up for VENT’s next Galapagos cruise Nov 28 to Dec 7, 2011, Victor will make a $300 donation to the Cornell Lab in your honor. (Incidentally, due to some changes in park regulations, this is the last cruise on which people will be able to visit all the major islands on the Galapagos in a single week.)

Victor Emanuel began organizing birding trips more than 30 years ago. He had some impressive help—among his early advisers and traveling mates were Peter Matthiessen, one of our greatest living nature writers, and Roger Tory Peterson himself. His staff has a combined 80 years of experience in organizing trips, according to his website, and his guides have an uncanny ability to find rare birds and keep them around long enough for participants to get great looks at them.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a nonprofit organization with an academic affiliation to Cornell University, but we depend on memberships, donations, and grants for the great majority of our funding. Thanks to everyone who supports us.

(Image: Swallow-tailed Gull, a Galapagos specialty, by Rhys Marsh via Birdshare)

The Cornell Lab

All About Birds
is a free resource

Available for everyone,
funded by donors like you

American Kestrel by Blair Dudeck / Macaulay Library