Board Members

President

Steve Holzman

Steve Holzman holds a BS in Zoology from Southern Illinois University and a master’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Georgia. After completing his degree at UGA, he began a thirty-year career in the natural resources field, spending the first three years with the US Forest Service and the next 27 with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, working primarily in Oregon and Georgia. Much of his work involved using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and data management to support the endangered species program and the National Wildlife Refuge System. The highlight of his career was spending 8 days on the USFWS’ Research Vessel Tiglax surveying seabirds in the Aleutian Islands, where seeing millions of auklets sailing through the air in tight formations around the islands was truly amazing. 

While living in Georgia, Steve became involved with the Georgia Ornithological Society (GOS), serving as Business Manager, Conservation Chair, and eventually President. He created Georgia’s first statewide birding listserv in 1998 and its first Facebook birding page ten years later. Steve loved leading field trips with his wife and birding partner, Rachel. Sharing a love of birds, and helping others get their first scope-views of new birds was one of the greatest joys of this time with GOS and continues to this day. 

For the last 10 years, Steve, and his wife Rachel have been spending a week each fall volunteering with the Cedar Grove Ornithological Research Station in Sheboygan County. They have so enjoyed their fall trips to Wisconsin that they decided to move to the state permanently after Steve retired in 2021. They have settled into a house on the Milwaukee River in Grafton and are thoroughly enjoying the new birds that drop into their yard and the adjacent river. Steve and Rachel look forward to exploring their new state and meeting other Wisconsin birders.  

Vice President

Chrissie Lindemann
 

Chrissie has a lifelong love of nature and birds and a long-standing interest in conservation. She earned a Masters in Science degree in Environmental Education from Antioch College spending time in Vermont, New Hampshire and Ohio living at the Glen Helen Nature Center and enjoying an avian bird rescue and rehabilitation operation. In 1974 Chrissie was granted a Federal Bird Banding permit, which led her to WSO for a grant for color band to assess the movements of the American Goldfinch and as an Educational Method to turn on children to bird life.

Chrissie and her stalwart lawyer husband, Gil Lindemann, thankfully shared similar interests and values. Together they raised three children while residing on a much explored ravine feeding into Lake Michigan and focus on adventuresome family travel to national parks in mutual support and their relationship with the natural world.

Chrissie’s employment has included work with native plants, and leading groups at the Wehr Nature center as a Field Naturalist. She stepped back from work as her three children were born with family the focus, but returned to teach biology in the early 80’s just as computers entered our world. After running an early computer lab, she began her own computer consulting business for businesses and individual long term clients and this work continues to the present day.

Secretary
Angie Tornes

Angie is a Columbus, Ohio, native and has lived in Minnesota, Germany, Puerto Rico, and Nebraska before moving to Milwaukee in 1994 to marry her husband, Mark. She gained her love of nature from her parents who frequently took the family to state parks and owned a regionally cherished nursery/landscape architecture firm. She became enchanted by birds at age 16 when her aunt gave her a copy of Robbins’ “A Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America”.

She received her BS in biology from the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University in northern Minnesota. There she studied ornithology, initiated an early spring migration class field trip to the prairie pothole region of South Dakota, and designed and installed bird deflection devices for campus buildings. In her first post-graduation job, she identified bird species and researched land use histories on newly acquired properties managed by the Minnesota DNR and The Nature Conservancy.

She attended The Ohio State University, serving as a teacher’s assistant in ornithology while working toward her MS thesis on avian reproductive success, later condensed in the “Journal of Ecology and Sociobiology.”

Treasurer
Michael Bingham
   

I am honored to serve on the Board of Directors for the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology. I absolutely love birding. My family, friends, and coworkers will tell you I am very easily distracted by birds, to the point of being dangerous at times, especially when I am driving.

My wife Kathleen and I have four children and nine grandchildren. We have lived in Deerfield Wisconsin for the past thirty years. I am currently the Vice President of Property Management for Fiduciary Real Estate and Development in Milwaukee Wisconsin where I oversee 10,500 apartment units in Wisconsin, Illinois, and North Carolina.

My love for birding and nature came from my mother Rose. I have always enjoyed nature and birding but have become more serious over the past five years. I have done countless field trips over the past few years through WSO, NRF, SWBA, Horicon Marsh Bird Festival, and Friends of Horicon Marsh. I really love birding in the Horicon Marsh area. I think one of my best birding moments was when I was on a field trip with Jeff Bahls at Horicon Marsh and was able to see baby Sora’s on the edge of the marsh. I really enjoy meeting new people that share my same passion for birds.

My goal this year is to do a better job of tracking what I see and observe. My passion for birding has been more visual than tracking and documenting what I have seen. 

Some of my other interests and hobbies are feeding the birds, hiking, nature, and golf.

I am currently a member of the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology, Natural Resource Foundation, Horicon Marsh Bird Club, Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, and Friends of Horicon Marsh. In addition, I am the treasurer and on the board of directors for the Horicon Marsh Club.

I look forward to meeting and getting to know all of you.

Immediate Past President

Lynn Barber

Lynn grew up in rural Marathon County, Wisconsin. After graduating from UW-Madison, she and husband Dave moved to Alaska. Since then, they have lived in Wisconsin, Oregon, North Carolina, Texas, South Dakota and Alaska again before moving back to Wausau in 2021. Lynn was a microbiology professor, and then went to law school and became a patent attorney, from which she retired in 2020. Before retirement, her husband was a meteorologist and a church pastor.

She has loved watching birds since childhood. In addition to birding wherever she has lived, she has birded most of the United States and Canada and on all the continents. She is a self-described nutty birder, and particularly enjoys doing big years, which are the topic of two of her books, Extreme Birder: One Woman’s Big Year (2011), and Big Years, Biggest States: Birding in Texas and Alaska (2020). She also is the author of Birds in Trouble (2016). Her books, published by Texas A&M University Press, are illustrated with her bird photographs and paintings.

She has been active in many birding organizations over the years, including Wake County Audubon Society, the Carolina Bird Club, Fort Worth Audubon Society (past president) and the Texas Ornithological Society (past president), as well as other community organizations.

She especially enjoys giving talks (virtually or in-person) on birds, on her birding experiences and extolling the joys of birding, and on optimizing yards for birds. Her other avocations include painting, nature-photography, church volunteer activities, playing the hammered dulcimer and handbells, and baking cookies.

Sunil Gopalan
 

Sunil grew up in a very urban but also a very bird-rich part of India and has lived in the midwestern United States for almost all of his adult life. He has early memories of mynahs, kites and peacocks from India and later became familiar with the usual feeder birds of Wisconsin. But a serious interest in birding didn't catch on until he took a break from a hectic work life when his daughter was born. The challenge of observing, studying, photographing and maybe even understanding these colorful creatures proved to have the capacity to be of lasting interest.

A widely published bird photographer, Sunil has spent time birding on five continents -- ranging from the mundane to the exotic -- but calls Middleton (Dane County) home with his wife Heidi and their two children.

Sunil has served on the WSO Board of Directors since 2019, as vice president 2020-2022 and as president 2022-2024. He also has written the Spring Seasonal Report for The Passenger Pigeon since 2015 and administers WSO’s websites. For a day job, he works full time at Epic, an EHR software development company, and has spent time playing various IT roles over the years.

Rebecca Gilman

Rebecca joined WSO as its administrative assistant in May of 2021. Since making the difficult decision to step down from that position in November, she has continued to volunteer for the organization. She serves on the Development, Conservation and Honey Creek Committees and maintains WSO’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. In addition, she and her husband, Charles Harmon, are WSO’s Regional Coordinators for Green and Lafayette Counties.

Rebecca owes her love of birds to her grandmother and her mother. Her grandmother knew the songs of all the birds on her farm in south Alabama, and her mother kept the feeders full in their backyard in Trussville, Ala., where Rebecca grew up. When Rebecca and Charles moved to Green County from Chicago, they fell in love with their home because there were already feeders up and resident flocks of goldfinches in their yard. They joined WSO while completing a block for the second Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas.

Wendy Schultz
 

Wendy started birding in March of 1981 when her microbiology professor invited her on a field trip to Lake Winnebago. He pointed out an America Kestrel and she could NOT believe such a beautiful bird could exist having never noticed one before. A few months later, she attended her first Owen J. Gromme Bird Club meeting and met a whole new group of friends who changed her life forever. One of them was a young bird artist named Tom Schultz. You might say the rest is history.

She spent those early years chasing birds obsessively (with Tom) until their sons came along and her schedule took her in other directions. In 2013, after their youngest turned 21, she decided to return to the “flock” and has been having a blast ever since. BIGBY birding is her FAVORITE.

Wendy works full time as an ICU nurse at ThedaCare Berlin and part time as a Hospice nurse, for Agnesian Hospice Hope—if you see her at work, you are probably in trouble. Along with birding, she loves to run, bike, and work in her garden. She is the WSO Awards Chair, the WSO BIGBY coordinator, co-founder and secretary of the Green Lake Bird Club, co-coordinator of the Green Lake Bird Festival, and bird surveyor for WBBA I and II.

Dan Pickarts
 

Dan grew up on a dairy farm in south central Wisconsin. As a child he and his brothers always spent their free time roaming the woods or the marsh behind the family farm where they hunted, fished, and trapped. After graduating high school, he joined the military and spent 22 years serving his country. Now he lives in Lodi with his wife, Donna, and their two sons, Gabriel and Kyle. He has always had a calling for being outdoors no matter what the weather is outside. With being outside so much he witnessed a lot of the beauty of wildlife and the outdoors and has passed this onto his sons. They, too, have come to appreciate all the things nature has to offer.

He came across the Honey Creek Preserve years ago and fell in love with the property. To him, it has to be one of the most unique properties he has ever been on, from the beautiful trout stream flowing through the limestone valley to the large mature hardwood forest. There is so much diversity and with that comes a lot of unique wildlife with those areas.

He loves boating with his family on Lake Wisconsin and attending his sons' sporting events. He now works for the VA hospital in Madison. When not doing any of those things you generally find him out at Honey Creek!

Carl Schroeder

Carl has a lifelong passion for birds that started on his ninth birthday with the gift of a Peterson Field Guide from his Grandma Been. Now in retirement, he is extending that passion beyond personal birding to support other birders and to promote bird conservation.

His work experience in project management has lent itself to many volunteer efforts, including running political action committees and serving on the boards of churches and high schools. For ten years he was the Wisconsin Christmas Bird Count editor for Audubon. During that time, he also managed the merger of the WSO and Audubon CBC programs. He has been active in other citizen science activities as well, including a wind turbine bird and bat mortality study, USGS breeding bird surveys, Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlasing and owl, nightjar, frog and toad surveys for the DNR.

Melissa Kesling (she/her)
 

Melissa was introduced to birding 5 years ago. What started as a hike tagging along with a friend to find birds turned into one continuous hike looking for those birds for the last 5 years. She's been having fun exploring new areas in WI in search of new birds to add to her life list.

Melissa is currently an Environmental Educator at Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona, WI. She first became involved with WSO after attending a hawk watch field trip at Harrington Beach in 2019. She remembers they didn’t see many hawks, but remembers how friendly and helpful everyone was.

She says "It’s been a real pleasure meeting so many people at different WSO events, and now I am thankful for the opportunity and look forward to serving on the WSO board."

Nate Shipley

Nate has long had a passion for the outdoors, but discovered birding during his undergraduate years and quickly became captivated by it. He enjoys many aspects of birding, from the simple pleasure of listening to birds on walks with his dog to more intensive pursuits such as listing, recording bird vocalizations, and traveling internationally to see new species. He is an especially active birder in Wisconsin and is particularly drawn to county listing, which motivates him to explore new places and find unusual birds in unexpected locations. He is actively working toward a goal of seeing 150 species in all 72 Wisconsin counties.

Originally from Kansas, Nate earned his BS from Kansas State University before going on to complete an MS at Clemson University and a PhD at the University of Illinois. His academic work focused on the human dimensions of conservation, including understanding birders’ motivations to contribute to conservation efforts and working with landowners to support participation in conservation programs. He has published multiple research articles and presented his work at professional conferences. Since moving to Wisconsin in 2021 with his wife, he has enjoyed immersing himself in the state’s birding community. Professionally, he works as a data scientist in the aerospace industry, where he focuses on data analysis, modeling, and automation.

Nate has been actively involved in birding organizations for many years, including serving as president of bird clubs at both Clemson and the University of Illinois. He has taught ornithology courses, mentored students, and led numerous field trips and bird walks. He also supports the Wisconsin birding community as an admin of the statewide Wisconsin Birds Discord group. He is particularly interested in bringing together his background in social science, data, and birding to support WSO’s mission, with a focus on strengthening community, expanding engagement, and supporting the birders who make conservation efforts possible.