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10th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium

Next RCBC Meeting

Annual RCBC Swimming Pool Party/Bar-B-Que
Wednesday, July 29th, 1:00 pm until evening
Home of Gary and Nancy Rogers
All are welcome
Call Gary and Nancy for directions
210-495-1873

Coming RCBC Events

Notice: In order to have our meetings at a time that more members can participate we have changed our meetings to the 2nd Wednesday of every month at 7:00 pm. We will be meeting in the homes of members. Usually meetings will be in the homes of Ed and Olga Kelly (210-342-6928) or Gary and Nancy Rogers (210-495-1873). All are welcome, please call for directions and to confirm location.

July 29th, Sunday, Annual Picnic, Home of Gary and Nancy Rogers
August 8th, Wednesday, 7:00 pm, Home of Ed and Olga Kelly
September 12th, Wednesday, 7:00 pm, Home of Gary and Nancy Rogers
September 26th, Wednesday, 7:00 pm, Home of Ed and Olga Kelly, Symposium Working Meeting
October 10th, Wednesday, 7:00 pm, Home of Ed and Olga Kelly, Symposium Working Meeting
October 13th & 14th, Saturday and Sunday, 10th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium
November 14th, Wednesday, 7:00 pm, Home of Gary and Nancy Rogers
December 2nd, Sunday, 4:00 pm, Annual Holiday Dinner, Home of Gary and Nancy Rogers

RCBC Club Newsletter, The River News, Available On-Line

The RCBC Newsleter, The River News, is available on-line, in full color PDF file format. The mailed version is black and white. By downloading from here you can print your own in color, or you can just view it on your computer screen.

Click here for the newest edition (November 2006, 2.5 MB) of The River News. Note that this issue inclues a detailed photo story on the 2006 Symposium.

Alternately, click here to visit our newsletter webpage, for links to all of the issues of The River News that are available on-line. The newsletter page also has a link to the Adobe website where you can download the Adobe Acrobat program for FREE. You need this program in order to view and print PDF files.

Yes this will be the tenth one! The time has gone so quickly. We think that the 10th Avian Symposium will be the best ever! It is scheduled for Saturday, October 13th and Sunday, October 14th at the Conference Center, College Station, Texas. It will be great to be at the home base of our partners in the symposium from the Schubot Exotic Bird Health Center at Texas A&M University. This location allows us to have greater participation from students at the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine. We will have students interested in Avian Medicine as speakers at the symposium and as guides for our tour of the School early Sunday Afternoon. Another feature of this location is that it has lower costs than our hotel based events. After the symposium we expect to be able to make larger veterinary student scholarship contributions than ever.

This is a symposium for all those interested in exotic birds, including pet owners, breeders, and veterinary professionals. Register as a group to get a discount price. Also note that we offer employees of the San Antonio Zoo and the Houston Zoo half price registrations and this offer is also extended to Vet-Tech students.

There will be some special events to celebrate having this event for ten years and to recognize our wonderful consistent sponsor ZuPreem. Have you attended all ten years?

Saturday's program will start at 8:00 am. We will have great speakers with interesting topics all day. Your registration fee includes both lunch and dinner. Lunch will be catered sandwiches. Dinner will feature Andy's famous award winning brisket.

Participants will choose between two special extended programs given in parallel on Sunday morning. One program will be on Socialization and Flight Experience and will be led by Dr. Brian Speer. The other program is the very popular and unique Wet Lab: Standard Laboratory, Treatment Anatomy. The lab is run in very small groups with close assistance from veterinary students, professors, and practicing veterinarians. This year we are adding two new topics: 1. Egg Necropsy & Candling, and 2. Taking samples for post mortem analysis.

Right after lunch in the early afternoon there will be small group tours of the Veterinary School and Clinic led by students. These tours are specially set up for symposium participants and will finish in mid afternoon to allow everyone plenty of time to head home before it gets too late.

The Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has certified the Seminar and Wet Lab for up to 11 hours of Continuing Education Credit.

Visit our symposium home page for more information including speakers and topics. Also from there you can get to our registration form page. We are looking forward to seeing you-all there!

Click here to visit our symposium home page

Photo Review of Past Symposiums

As part of our celebration of our 10th year of having these symposiums we are pulling our old web pages and photos out of the archives. Here are some links to photos taken over the past ten years. Watch out, putting up these old pages forced us to edit the links to make them work for the current RCBC web site. There were a lot of changes and it would be easy to miss a few so if you find a bad one please let us know. Hope you enjoy the photos. Check back once in a while, we hope to keep adding to the collection. If you have some great photos to add let us know. It would be fun to put them up too.

The 5th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium (2002) in College Station, Texas

The 6th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium (2003) in San Antonio, Texas

The 7th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium (2004) at the Mayan Ranch in Bandera, Texas

ZuPreem again participated in the 9th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium as a sponsor at the highest level. In addition they made an additional contribution to provide all seminar participants with tote bags. These sturdy bags carried both the ZuPreem logo and the Seminar logo.

ZuPreem has been a sponsor of the Avian Symposium since its inception (now 9 years). They have contributed directly to the symposium as a major sponsor every year. We really appreciate their consistent support of Aviculture. They offer an excellent product line of pet foods including bird foods and deserve our support as customers. Samples of ZuPreem products and product literature were given to all symposium participants in their seminar tote bags. The photo above shows the ZuPreem product display table (click the image to see a larger image of the photo). Visit the informative ZuPreem web site to learn more.

Thank you ZuPreem!

RCBC Visits the San Antonio Zoo

A small group of RCBC members visited the San Antonio Zoo in March 2006 to deliver the toys that we assembled at our February Meeting and to deliver a check for a contribution to the bird department from the proceeds of the 2005 Avian Seminar. Special thanks go to Sue Helms who at the end of the meeting took home all of the left over materials and finished making the toys for us. The photo at left shows our group in front of some parrott display cages at the zoo with Steve Trebilccock and Danny Rohrback of the San Antonio Zoo avian staff. Pictured from left to right are: Samantha Guz (Gary's grandaughter), Ed Kelly, Trace Kelly (Ed's grandson), Steve Trebilcock, Donny Rohrbach, Christine Deegear, and Jackie Guz (Gary's other grandaughter). Not pictured (taking the photo): Gary Rogers. After completing the delivery Ed and Gary each took some time to enjoy the zoo with their grandchildren. Note that Donny Rohrback is a member of RCBC and was working on his job at the zoo (taking care of birds - what else?) when we visited. Afterwards Donny had Samantha and Jackie "help" him water and feed some of the birds in his care (photo above right). It was a great experience for them - thanks Donny. Click either photo to view a larger copy.

Photos by Gary Rogers

The 9th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium

The 9th Annual South Texas Avian Symposium will be held again at the Holiday Inn in Houston, Texas. The hotel is the Holiday Inn Houston Intercontinental which is at the intersection of Beltway 8 & JFK Blvd. very near the Houston Airport. Last year everyone was great (speakers, participants, club members, and hotel staff) and this year will be even better. Two of our really great speakers have moved away (Dr. David Phalen and Dr. Darryl Styles) to take advantage of wonderful new carrer opportunities. But we have some great new speakers that everyone will want to hear: Dr. Sharman Hoppes and Dr. Donald Brightsmith (both of whom recently joined the faculity of the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine), Dr. Natalie Antinoff (who is in private Veterinary Practice in the Houston Area), and Barbara Heidenreich.

Dr. Donald Brightsmith is well known and highly reguarded for his field work at the Tambopota Macaw Project in Peru. His talk will feature photos and personal recolections from his work there.

Barbara Heidenreich is a world acclaimed author and behaviorist. She has been a professional in the field of animal behavior and training since 1990. She was the founder of the great magazine, "Good Bird™", and strongly believes in the magazines tag line "Fostering the human-animal bond with positive reinforcement." Barbara will speak twice at the Symposium. First on Saturday afternoon she will present "Training Birds for Medical and Husbandry Behaviors." Then on Sunday morning she will present a 3 hour workshop: "Solving Companion Parrot Behavior Problems." The Sunday Workshop will be more intimate and less formal than the Saturday lecture because many of the Symposium participants will be attending the other session: "Wet Lab: Standard Laboratory Treatment Anatomy." We hope that several of the Workshop participants will bring their personal companion parrot to participate in live demonstrations with Barbara.

Breakfast for two is included in our special package rate at the hotel. As usual Saturday's Lunch is included for all symposium participants. It will provide a great chance for everyone to personally greet our speakers. Then Saturday evening we will gather in the Hotel's hospitality suite for appitizers and the announcements of the winners of the silent auction.

Program:
Dr. Thomas Vice, Moderator
Dr. Ian Tizard, "Schubot Center Research Projects" & "Newest Information on Avian Influenza"
Dr. Donald Brightsmith, "Tambopata Research with Video"
Dr. Miguel Saggese, "New Approaches to PDD"
Dr. Sharman Hoppes, "Avian Lung Disease: Diagnosis and Treatment" & "Effects of Allergies on Pet Birds"
Dr. Natalie Antinoff, "What Avian Medicine Can Offer You"
Barbara Heidenreich, "Training Birds for Medical and Husbandry Behaviors"
and "Workshop: Solving Companion Bird Behavior Problems"
All Speakers, “Questions & Answers”
“Wet Lab: Standard Laboratory, Treatment Anatomy”

Additional Information Here

The 60 page seminar program book that was given to all participants at the 2005 Seminar is available here in the form of a pdf file. (3 MB) Note that in this file two pages are blank. We could not get the article in digital form to insert into this file. It was pasted in the master copy to be duplicated for the seminar participants the old fashioned way using tape and scissors. A similar updated seminar program book will be given to all participants again this year.