(Note: With a busy household of three delightful young children, Jay is taking a sabbatical from our tour schedule for now. We -- and we know many of you -- hope to see him out in the field again on future trips. In the meantime, he is staying well connected to the Field Guides family by handling some important behind-the-scenes tasks for us from home.)

Jay VanderGaast was introduced to birding by his father, and his obsession with birds was evident by age seven when he memorized the plates in Peterson's eastern field guide. He went on to earn a B.S. in biology at university and briefly contemplated a career in research, but two years on the buggy arctic tundra watching ptarmigan do little other than occasionally getting eaten by Gyrfalcons soon put an end to that plan! Instead, he strapped on a backpack and a pair of bins and began roaming the world in search of birds.

His travels eventually led him to Costa Rica, where he stumbled into a job as a birding guide at Rancho Naturalista Lodge. Amazed that he was actually getting paid to watch birds, he jealously guarded his position there for six years. His career with Field Guides coincided with the dawn of the new millennium (if you believe that began in 2000!), and since then he has guided more than 100 tours on several continents.

When he's not on tour, Jay's native habitat is his home near Montreal, where he lives with his partner, Annie, and their growing family--daughter Ariane, son Noah, and newly arrived daughter Elodie.