Rose Ann Rowlett has been birding since her second-grade teacher influenced her and her brother to start identifying Texas migrants using Richard Pough's eastern Audubon guide with the marvelous Eckelberry illustrations. Their birding "patch," originally limited by bicyle distance, was expanded to greater Austin, and in time all of central Texas, through the kindness of birders in the Travis Audubon Society, especially Fred and Marie Webster and Edgar Kincaid, who turned every weekend into a new adventure in an expanding world.

Rose Ann's enduring love for Neotropical birds began to develop in 1960, when Edgar took the "the Eager Beavers" (Rose Ann, her brother, and their friend Frank Oatman) on their first of many school-holiday birding trips to Mexico, leaving them totally corrupted by the tropics. After graduate school in biology, with specialties in botany and ornithology, Rose Ann returned to Texas to help complete the editing of Oberholser's The Bird Life of Texas (1974), a project she had worked on for years.

She began guiding tours to the Neotropics in 1975, was one of the principals of Victor Emanuel Nature Tours for 10 years, and was one of the founders of Field Guides in 1985. Over the years she has guided some 300 birding tours, specializing in trips to South America (her favorite continent), but detouring regularly these days to Southeast Asia, another corrupting influence that keeps her wanting to return--for more pheasants, pittas, barbets, babblers, and broadbills. Rose Ann combines a broad natural history background with special interests in bird song and behavior. Rose Ann and her sweetie, Richard Webster, continue to increase their yard list at their home on Cave Creek above Portal, Arizona, where they are happily distracted by the likes of Acorn Woodpeckers and Painted Redstarts, not to mention a whole host of hummers.