Who We Are

ABOUT EXOTIC BIRDING

Exotic Birding is a joint venture of Jim Wittenberger and Laura Fellows. Jim became an avid birder as a teenager, an interest that led to a PhD in zoology and an early career conducting research on bird behavior. He later morphed into a software engineer, giving him technical skills he could combine with his knowledge of birds and birding to form the basis of our company. Laura was a commercial photographer and studio manager of a major advertising studio in Atlanta GA for 15 years, during which time she organized and led numerous photo shoots in both North and South America. She then founded one of the first photography workshops in Italy, where she learned fluent Italian and gained experience organizing and leading group photography tours and workshops. She had long dreamed of doing bird photography, and meeting Jim gave her that opportunity. Their combined talents led to the creation of a Exotic Birding LLC, a tour company devoted to offering superior birding and bird photography tours to exotic places, currently to the Neotropics and East Africa, but eventually to exotic places elsewhere in the world as well.

The goal of our company is always to share a quality experience with our clients at a reasonable price. We keep our prices low by operating with low overhead and, whenever possible, arranging logistics ourselves rather than using land agents who have their own profit margins added into the final price. In this regard, we are unlike most other birding tour companies currently in operation. While our prices are very competitive, they are not necessarily the lowest on the market. That's because we travel in small groups rather than spreading fixed expenses across a dozen or more people, hire professional drivers with roomy vehicles whenever possible, and prefer staying in comfortable accommodations whenever they are available near prime birding locales.

JIM WITTENBERGER

Jim Wittenberger developed a fascination for birding as a teenager, a passion that carried him through to a PhD in Zoology from the University of California. As a graduate student, he studied polygamous mating behavior, territorial behavior, gender differences in parental behavior, and avian song dialects of Bobolinks in eastern Oregon, leading to publication of several empirical and theoretical papers on the species. He published a variety of subsequent papers in leading scientific journals on song behavior, colonial behavior, territorial behavior, and mammalian social behavior. These culminated in publication of a far-reaching textbook he authored on the evolution of animal social behavior, which was widely received as a significant contribution to the field. He was an invited speaker at the British Animal Behavior Society meetings in Cambridge England, and his contribution became the closing chapter of the symposium proceedings. He was honored as an Elective Member of the American Ornithologists Union in 1981 and received the Harry R. Painton Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society for best paper of the year in 1983. Shortly thereafter, he decided to enter the then relatively new field of software engineering, a career he has pursued ever since. He has traveled extensively throughout the world, including to Hawaii, Alaska, the Pribilof Islands, Central America, South America, Europe, Australia, East Africa, and much of North America.

LAURA L FELLOWS

Laura L Fellows is co-founder of Exotic Birding LLC with Jim Wittenberger and conducts most of our tours as leader and tour coordinator. She has worked as a professional photographer since 1983. Laura's vision as a bird photographer is to portray birds and other animals as they live and behave in their natural environments. She published her vision of such "Environmental Portraits" in the December 2007 issue of Nature Photography magazine. Her photos have been used in biology textbooks and on professional websites. Before embarking on her current venture with Exotic Birding, Laura had 16 years professional experience as a commercial photographer and advertising studio manager for an internationally recognized studio in Atlanta. In that capacity she organized, coordinated and executed major photography assignments for numerous national advertising campaigns on location in the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and many states in the US. She founded and directed a photography workshop program in the Tuscany region of Italy, where she lived for 3 years. Through her efforts the workshop attracted many internationally renowned photographers as guest instructors. She speaks fluent Italian and is now gaining familiarity with Spanish. She has lectured as an invited speaker in the art department at the University of Georgia and many photo clubs, has exhibited her photographs in galleries, and has curated 5 photography exhibitions in the USA and Italy. Laura has enjoyed a life-long love and fascination for birds and nature. Some of her many photographs can be seen throughout our website.