Guest Speaker: Paul Riss - "My Punk Rock Big Year"

From 7:30 pm until 9:30 pm

At Wye Marsh

Paul Riss is an award-winning ad director/documentary filmmaker (CBC Docs "Rare Bird Alert") /Punk Rock Birder.

Paul Riss rather stands out in a crowd of birders. He puts the lie to the myth that birdwatching is just for "tiny old ladies with blue hair and Tilley hats". He's a hardcore birder. He's also a big punk rock fan.

On New Year's Eve 2010, Paul Riss kissed his wife at midnight, then went outside to look for a pigeon. The pigeon he spotted was outside of the music venue Lee's Palace in Toronto, where the likes of Nirvana and Canadian punk veterans D.O.A have played. It was the first of 234 different birds he would see that year and was the start of his "Big Year", a challenge birders give themselves to see as many birds as possible within one year and specific geographical borders.

Paul combines his love of bird watching with his other passions - punk rock and tattoos. He already had several bird tattoos, like the flock that runs down his right arm and reproductions of his two favourite birds (a Brown Thrasher and a Marsh Wren). But he decided to indelibly commemorate his Big Year by tattooing the names of each of the 234 birds on his body. He's hoping his Big Year will inspire a new generation of young birders to take up the hobby.

"Maybe they will identify with a guy like me who still goes to punk shows, is covered in tattoos and doesn't look like their mom or dad or grandparents," Riss says.