Please join us for our spring 2026 convention on April 24-26 at Wyndham Ft. Smith. As always, we have great field trips planned, as well as outstanding speakers.
The hotel offers both king and double rooms for $110/night (not including tax). To reserve your room at that rate, click here. The cutoff date for our reserved block of rooms is March 27.
Register for the convention here by March 27 to qualify for Early Bird registration rates: $25 for AAS members and $30 for non-members. Please note the cutoff date for registration with meals is one week before the meeting, April 17.
On Friday night, Ragan Sutterfield, author, priest and lifelong birder, will be our speaker. His topic will be “There Are No Unsacred Places”: Learning Grief and Hope with Wendell Berry. Drawing on over three decades of birding, Ragan Sutterfield will dialogue with the work of the farmer and writer Wendell Berry to explore grief and hope for the natural world. Berry's poetry, essays, and fiction give voice to the losses birders know well, but Berry also captures the hope that can come from good work and a deep love for the land. Through this talk we will learn why Berry says that "There are no unsacred places / only sacred places and desecrated places," and how that recognition can empower a deeper conservation ethic.
Saturday afternoon's symposium will feature Taylor Long, one of our eBird reviewers. He will take us "Behind the Checklist: An eBird Reviewer's Perspective,” and will answer any questions we may have. Send any questions you have on this topic to Taylor.
Saturday night, Dr. Ragupathy Kannan, professor of biology at UAFS since 1994. will be our speaker. He will talk about the "Rapid Expansion of Limpkins across Anglo America." Kannan and his colleague, Dr. Jack Jackson, mentored two local high school students to research the rapid spread of Limpkins across North America. Their research appeared as the cover story in the Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science. With over 600 downloads, the paper is among the most popular in recent times in that journal. The team downloaded information from citizen science databases, eBird and iNaturalist to track and quantify the spread of Limpkins from their traditional Florida range. They also tracked the spread of the Limpkins' favored food, Apple Snails. Their findings have implications for the spread of other organisms in the wake of human-caused climate change.
Field Trip Co-Coordinators Sandy Berger and Matt Matlock have planned exciting field trips in and around their hometown of Ft. Smith, with 11 guided trips planned over 3 days, including trips to Sequoyah NWR in Oklahoma, Lake Fort Smith State Park, and Frog Bayou. Nearby Sunnymede Park, on the Arkansas River, is another highlight in the lineup. Take time to look at the options and choose your favorites!
We hope you can join us for another great convention. As always, we will hold a silent auction. It is not too early to think about items to donate. Just bring them when you check in and we’ll take it from there. We always appreciate those of you who include a donation with your registration; this allows us some breathing room in our planning. Also, it’s election year, so we will be electing a new President and Vice President! Watch for the spring newsletter for details.
Please come for an entertaining and educational weekend of birding, learning, and fellowship with friends, old and new.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
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Ragan Sutterfield has been birding in Arkansas since he was twelve. He lives in Little Rock with his family and works as a priest at Christ Episcopal Church. Ragan's writing has been featured in Birding Magazine, The Oxford American, and The Christian Century, among other places. He is the author of five books, including Wendell Berry and the Given Life, The Art of Being a Creature, and Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice. Ragan is a volunteer eBird reviewer and the founder of Mourning Cloak Conservation Burial (mourningcloakburial.org) an organization dedicated to establishing Arkansas's first conservation cemetery.
Professor Ragupathy Kannan joined the biology faculty at UAFS 32 years ago, shortly after he finished his doctorate at the University of Arkansas under the mentorship of Douglas A. James. Before that he received two master's degrees, the first from the University of Madras and the second from the University of Louisiana at Monroe. During his stellar career at UAFS, he has received four overseas Fulbright Scholar awards (including a Fulbright Specialist award) for teaching and research (India 2007 and 2019, Sri Lanka 2020, Malaysia 2024). He has traveled widely and published extensively on his research on tropical birds and climate change. His writings have appeared in prestigious periodicals like Science and National Geographic. Many of his publications are co authored by his students, some of whom have followed in his footsteps for fruitful careers in science and teaching. He is the only faculty member at UAFS who has received the Research Award twice, first in 2011 and again in 2022. He is very active in the birdwatchers' community in Arkansas and has led more than 15 overseas fundraising nature tours to Central and South America for the Arkansas Audubon Society Trust, for which he serves as chair. At UAFS he has taught popular study abroad courses to Belize and Trinidad for more than 15 years.