Kristine Rivers is a lifelong birder, author, and the founder of Birding for Fun, an organization offering guided tours, workshops, and family-friendly events that embrace her philosophy that nature should be accessible to everyone. She’s written five birding books, and was honored to co-author the most recent title, “Bird Detectives: Science Sleuths and Their Feathered Friends” with Carla J. Dove, Program Director of the Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Kristine enjoys sharing her love of nature, offering virtual birding classes and workshops year-round, as well as in-person classes and events in partnership with League City Parks & Recreation. She has provided nature-based education for the Cities of Pearland, Meadows Place, and Missouri City, as well as UTMB’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in both Galveston and Angleton. She is a popular blogger and guest speaker, and has been instrumental in developing nature tourism within her community; the birding itineraries she created for Galveston Island Nature Tourism Council (GINTC) and Bay Area Houston Convention & Visitors Bureau are available to the public free of charge. Kristine has been a FeatherFest leader since 2016, as well as Area Leader for the Brazoria-Columbia Bottomlands CBC since 2013 and for the Galveston West End CBC since 2019. She is a proud Texas Master Naturalist, and served as President of her local chapter from 2017 to 2019. You can connect with Kristine, learn about upcoming events, and register for classes and workshops at birdingforfun.com.

Kristine Rivers
Upcoming Events
Clear Creek winds its way from Clear Lake through League City in Galveston County, providing beneficial freshwater riparian edge habitat to a wide variety of bird species and other wildlife. This pre-festival trip explores some of the hidden gems in the Clear Lake Loop of the Upper Texas Coast – Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, beginning with the beautiful Dr. Ned and Fay Dudney Clear Creek Nature Center. We’ll hike along the trails there looking for spring migrants such as…
Find out more »Birding Seabrook
This pre-festival trip will explore some of the best birding spots on the Clear Lake Loop of the Upper Texas Coast - Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail. This area contains a variety of habitats, including approximately 60 acres of oak woodlands, riparian edge habitat along the bayou, freshwater ponds, wetlands, and bay waters. This amazing habitat diversity attracts a wide variety of resident and migratory bird species, as well as other wildlife such as turtles, deer, alligators, and swamp rabbits. We'll…
Find out more »Birders will find this workshop/field trip combo the perfect introduction to coastal birding. During the workshop, your guides will give a brief discussion about the diversity of species, as well as various techniques to identify birds on the Upper Texas Coast. We will then board our bus and proceed to the East End Lagoon Nature Preserve beach area where you’ll see Black Skimmer, American Avocet, Black-necked Stilt, and many species of shorebirds, gulls, terns, sandpipers, plovers, and more. Stops along the way will highlight birds preferring marsh habitat.
Find out more »Our trip begins with a bus ride to the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory to watch migrant songbirds being caught in mist nets and banded by professional bird banders. This project establishes baseline data for the GCBO property on both resident and migratory bird populations. Banding allows the observatory to obtain information about the physical condition of migrants at this intermediate location between the coast and the bottomland forests lying well inland. Both coastal woodlots and inland bottomland forests are known to be extremely important stopover habitats for nearctic-neotropical migrants that move through the Gulf of Mexico region. Birds that are captured for banding can provide valuable information about their relative physical condition. What a unique opportunity….and that is just the start of this exciting field trip!
Find out more »Don’t miss this popular field trip to the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, which is designated an Internationally Significant Shorebird site and contains more water than land within its 44,000+ acres. We’ll leave dark and early on our bus trip to the refuge, crossing San Luis Pass at sunrise and making a quick stop to check for rails in the lagoons. As we continue westward along the Bluewater Highway, we’ll check the small lagoons along the way for nesting herons and keep an eye out over the wetlands for raptors. We’ll continue along the levee road that follows Oyster Creek, offering the possibility of Ospreys, White Pelicans, and lingering winter waterfowl.
Find out more »We are excited to offer this first-time FeatherFest field trip with two festival favorites – Kristine Rivers and Mark Scheuerman! Join them for a rare look at these two remarkable properties that are not open to the public.
Find out more »