Arlington Community Education

Ben Brown-Steiner seriously got into birdwatching while a graduate student at Cornell University, where he took recreational classes at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Since moving to Boston, Ben has become heavily invested in songbirds and shorebirds, and travels around exploring the many nooks and crannies where he can find birds in and within New England.

Ben Brown-Steiner and Toni Sacco have been birdwatching together for over a decade starting with classes taken at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. In 2020 they travelled throughout Eastern Massachusetts birdwatching as a socially distanced activity, observing over 160 species during the course of the year. Ben is partial to tree birds and their elaborate songs while Toni likes water and shore birds.