With more than a decade's experience guiding birding, nature, and photography tours around the world, Josh Engel founded Red Hill Birding in 2016. Based in Chicago, we run a limited selection of local and international tours. Most of our trips are custom trips, so get a group of friends together and get in touch with us about the birding trip of a lifetime.
Why “RED HILL”
Red Hill is a rough translation of Rosenberg, Josh's maternal family name. It was his maternal grandfather, Dick Rosenberg, who first took him birding. That first outing, when Josh was about 9 years old, was to Crabtree Nature Center in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. By coincidence, the director of Crabtree at that time has twice traveled to Africa with Josh!
About our tours
Our tour itineraries are designed with birding as the focus, but what we really go for is the overall experience of birding and traveling wherever you might be. While the daily schedule revolves around birding, we don't ignore cool animals, places, people, or photo opportunities. We make sure that you get to sample local foods and we often include the most important local cultural sites in our itineraries. Custom itineraries can be designed to ensure you have the perfect trip--whether it's a hardcore, fast-paced birding trip to see every endemic or a more relaxed trip that combines the best of birding, animal viewing, and culture.
red hill birders
Josh Engel
Josh is the founder of Red Hill Birding. He grew up birding in the suburbs of Chicago and knew from a young age that birding and travel would factor heavily in his future. After spending a semester studying abroad in Ecuador as an undergrad, he knew he needed to get back there after graduation. He soon found a job guiding in Ecuador for a large international birding tour company, before moving to South Africa where he spent nearly four years as a full time guide, leading trips throughout Southern Africa, Madagascar, Asia, and beyond. He has guided trips on four continents and conducted bird research around the world.
Prior to starting Red Hill Birding, Josh was an ornithologist at The Field Museum in Chicago. Based in Chicago, he appears regularly in the local media, served on the board of the Illinois Ornithological Society, and helped run the Illinois Young Birders. He is also husband to Amanda and father to Lucy Lark.
Adam Sell
Adam doesn't remember a time when a pair of binoculars wasn't around his neck. He was mentored by his father and other local birders in north Texas and later by the incredible birding community of the Chicagoland area. He is deeply involved in his local birding community, including time spent on the board of the Illinois Ornithological Society and as a member of the Illinois Ornithological Records Committee.
A former middle school teacher, Adam is a natural teacher and has found guiding clients to be his preferred classroom. He joined Red Hill Birding full-time in 2022 after spending summers guiding across Central and North America. He now both organizes and guides tours around the globe, and works alongside Josh on the day-to-day operations of Red Hill Birding. Adam sets out to ensure that both the novice birder and world lister have an incredible experience in the field. When not birding, you can find Adam enjoying all other aspects of nature and relaxing outdoors with his wife Tiffany, and son Ian.
steve Huggins
Steve was born and raised in Tewkesbury, England, where he became a prolific local patch birder (at Bredon’s Hardwick, Worcs) while getting deep into twitching, eventually amassing a UK list of over 450 species. He moved to Chicago in 2000, where he quickly became a stalwart of the Illinois birding community. After a career as an environmental engineer, he decided he needed to spend more time birding and sharing his love of birds, so he made a career switch to become a full time birding guide.
You’ll find him leading Red Hill trips to his native England, throughout his adopted United States, and in many countries spanning the globe. To all of these places he brings humor, expertise, good spirits, and a love of trying new beers. Steve lives on Chicago’s north side.
amanda Engel
Amanda traces her birding roots to her great-grandmother, making her a fourth generation birder! Now there is a fifth generation birder in the picture, her daughter Lucy Lark. She has a particular fondness for grassland birds, especially when Bobolink and Eastern Meadowlark songs ring out over the Midwestern prairie in summer. Amanda's other great passion is architecture and design. Indeed, she spent four years working for the Chicago Architecture Center and has worked as a contractor for the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She leads the architecture part of our Chicago Birds & Architecture tours and helps Red Hill Birding at events.
Jason Weckstein
Jason holds the prestigious position of Curator of Ornithology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Both an ornithologist and a birder, Jason's interest in birds was first piqued in college, where he worked for a professor studying the Blue-winged/Golden-winged Warbler hybrid zone. He later studied White-crowned Sparrows, Fox Sparrows, and toucans for his graduate work. Field work has taken him throughout North America, the Neotropics, and Africa. He helps guide our Cape May tours, just an hour-and-a-half drive from his home in Philadelphia, and tries to get out fishing and birding as much as his schedule permits!
Matt igleski
Matt is an environmental educator at the Lincoln Park Zoo by trade, so he is constantly teaching people and learning about the natural world. He came to birding by way of taking an ornithology course during his graduate studies in Michigan. The course nurtured Matt’s birding curiosity into a full-on avian obsession. After moving with his wife, Vickie, to Chicago in 2013, their primary avocation has become birding all the spots that Chicago and Northwest Indiana has to offer. They’ve since traveled to other birding hotspots around the country, chasing rarities and exploring the amazing natural areas that the United States has to offer. Matt truly enjoys helping people explore the natural world and showing them the birds that live there. He primarily guides our Minnesota trips.
STEPHANIE BEILKE
Stephanie is the Conservation Science Manager with Audubon Great Lakes and serves on the board for the Chicago Ornithological Society. Her passion for birds was sparked at age eight when she discovered a flock of migrating warblers using the backyard of her childhood home in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Since then, her excitement for birds has fueled her hobby as a birder, her work in conservation, as well as her involvement in numerous volunteer endeavors from bird banding to collision monitoring to breeding bird surveys. Stephanie finds immense joy in exploring the many natural areas in the Chicago region as well as sharing her love of birds and nature with others.
Lisa Maier
Lisa has always had an intense love and passion for wild places. She didn’t consider herself a birder until around 10 years ago and it has since become of full blown obsession. While watching birds, Lisa became interested in the interconnections between birds, the insects they eat and the plants that support them both. She has spent the last several years educating and inspiring others to care about our natural world and manage their yards to support birds and other wildlife.
Lisa is very active with McHenry County Audubon Society where she serves as Vice President, bird walk leader, Program Coordinator and Newsletter Editor. She also serves as Trustee of Environmental for the Village of Holiday Hills, does volunteer wildlife monitoring for Bird Conservation Network, McHenry County Conservation District and Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and is an official counter for the Fort Sheridan Hawkwatch. An avid gardener, Lisa is a mentor for The Wildlife Preservation and Propagation Committee’s Natural Garden in Your Yard program. She is also an accomplished artist and beekeeper. Lisa grew up in Chicago and currently resides in McHenry County.
Jeff Bilsky
Jeff grew up in the north suburbs of the Chicago area hiking and riding his bike through the local forest preserves, but the West is where he really first learned to love birding. He moved to Salt Lake City in 2006 and was surrounded by the mountains and amazing, endless wilderness to explore. The wilds of Utah hooked him and he was all-in on birding.
He moved back to the Chicago area in 2017 and spends as much time as possible exploring the forest preserves and lakefront. You'll find him most often hiking his patch at Skokie Lagoons or watching the skies at Fort Sheridan during hawkwatch season. Additionally, Jeff volunteers with several local birding organizations leading field trips and contributing to conservation initiatives. He helped spearhead a collaboration with The Chicago Bird Alliance and the MWRD to protect Techny Basin, which has led to ongoing, annual success for grassland nesting species.
Johnny Wilson
Johnny Wilson, originally from South Africa, has cherished a profound connection with birds and nature since early childhood. His first birding memory dates back to the year before he started school, when he spotted an African Green-Pigeon during a family vacation in Kruger National Park. It was also there that Johnny learned to read—using a bird guide. Since those formative years, Johnny has birded on six continents, served as an eBird reviewer for ten countries and several high seas locations, and mentored countless students in bird banding and survey techniques. Professionally, Johnny has authored Africa’s first conservation biology textbook (www.consbio.africa). Another career highlight was spending 13 months on Gough Island in the remote South Atlantic where he worked with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to combat the catastrophic effects of invasive mice predating on seabirds.
Fran Morel
Fran started birding in 2006 and now spends lots of time birding at local Cook County preserves and hotspots. He’s been a board member and Membership Chair at the Chicago Ornithological Society for over 10 years. Fran will always be thankful for the friendly and patient birders who answered all of his questions at Montrose during his first few years in the field, and now enjoys helping others who are starting off on their own birding journey. In his spare time, Fran is an experienced restaurant executive who does restaurant and HR consulting through his company, Morel Great Lakes.
nathan goldberg
Nathan joined the Red Hill Birding team as a recent graduate from Cornell University. An avid birder for over a decade and from the Chicagoland region, he started out with Red Hill doing local guiding in the Chicago area and later expanded his repertoire to guiding trips across the US. He’s now an emeritus guide of sorts, who we try to bring out of retirement to lead occasional tours for us. He set the Illinois Big Year record in 2020, seeing 341 species over the course of the year.
