Kateri Kosek has been birding since she was about six years old, learning to read with the help of some Peterson field guides, or so the story goes. In her late teenage years, her birding knowledge branched out exponentially with the help of the Ralph T. Waterman Bird Club in Dutchess County, NY, where she grew up. 

Kateri is a poet, essayist, and college English instructor, but she has occasionally worked surveying bird populations in the Taconic Mountains for the nonprofit Green Berkshires, and in Aton Forest in northwest Connecticut, where she also studied breeding bird territories in successional fields. She has written birding columns for the Poughkeepsie Journal and The Berkshire Edge, and as a freelance journalist for the Edge, she covers environmental and bird-related topics whenever possible. Birds underpin her creative writing, as well, and recently, she authored the text for The Forest Revealed: An Illustrated Year, a book of watercolor paintings by Maine artist Jada Fitch depicting the northern forest, forthcoming later this year.

Kateri has surveyed Mountain Birdwatch routes in Vermont and New Hampshire for the last five years, a program run by the Vermont Center for Eco studies. She also serves on the board of the Center for Northern Woodlands Education. After ten years in the Berkshires, where she briefly served as secretary and vice president of the Hoffman Bird Club, she now lives in northern Vermont.