THE (BEFORE) BREAKFAST CLUB
ON A BRISK SATURDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER DOZENS of teens were quicker to rise than the birds. While other high schoolers across Columbus slumbered on, the tight-knit group met downtown shortly after dawn to kick off the 12th annual conference of the Ohio Young Birders Club (OYBC) with a bird walk. Binoculars slung around their necks, they chatted outside the rendezvous point at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center, excited that the event they’d been anticipating for months was finally here.
As the clock slipped just a few ticks past 8 a.m., Sarah Winnicki stepped in front of the crowd. “I was an OYBC student,” she told them. “Now I’m an old person.”
Winnicki is 24. As she led her fellow birders along the Scioto River through a wooded area that was once a waste-clogged brownfield, it wasn’t the teens who had questions; several parents who’d tagged along peppered Winnicki with queries about the club, the largest group of its kind in the country. She was one of its earliest members, she told them, having joined shortly after it launched in 2006. A few months ago she was asked to give the keynote address for this year’s conference. The invitation moved her to tears.
Winnicki has watched the OYBC grow from a handful of kids to 120 at present. Hundreds more have gone through
