about us
We live in Fairfax Station, Virginia, which is located less than 20 miles south-west of Washington, D. C. It's a lovely and historic region of northern Virginia near old downtown Fairfax, historic Clifton and Occoquan, and the Civil War battlefields of Bull Run, in Manassas.
Suzanne grew up in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, just a few miles south of Philadelphia, not too far from the Philadelphia International Airport. She has one brother, Les, who lives just a couple of miles from their childhood home. Les and his wife Sue have one child, Suzanne's neice, Rebecca.
Tony, on the otherhand, grew up in a U. S. Navy family, living in a variety of places such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Charleston, South Carolina; Corpus Christi, Texas, Capitol Heights, Maryland; and Virginia Beach and Norfolk, Virginia. Tony graduated from Virginia Tech and The George Washington University with degrees in Civil Engineering and Structural Engineering. He has worked his entire career at a U. S. Navy R&D lab outside Washington, D. C. performing numerical structural and structural acoustic response predictions and ship design software development. Tony's interest in birds began with hummingbirds at potted petunias on a backyard deck, bird feeding and perched, road-side raptors. A guided tour to see raptors at the Snake River Birds of Prey Area led to raptor banding at the Cape May Raptor Banding Project, which led to an interest in raptor photography, which led to general bird photography, etc.
Anyone truly serious about birding makes (or at least seriously considers) the pilgramage to the Galapagos Islands where Charles Darwin's research eventually led to his publication of the seminal tome on evolution "The Origin of Species." We traveled to the Galapagos during the summer of 2010 and saw all the endemic avian specialties, including each of Darwin's finches.
We like to travel and are forturnate that two of our favorite activities, birding and skiing, can take us to many new and different destinations. Although we've only travelled internationally a relatively few times, when a ski trip takes us abroad we always combine it with a tour of a nearby historic city or region. So, through European trips abroad with our ski club, Ski Club of Washington D. C., we've been able to see historic Salzburg and Radstadt, Austria; Venice, Italy; Martigny and Lucerne, Switzerland; and Paris, France. By comparison, we've only been abroad a couple of times for birding, to Veracruz, Mexico and the Galapagos and Sacha Lodge, Ecuador. We plan to do more international traveling for birding in the very near future.
While international travel is exciting there are so many places we want to visit in the United States that we'll probably never get to all of them, but we try to visit a new national park or wildlife refuge every Fall (after everyone's kids are back in school and crowds are reduced).