Richard "Dick" Cannings, a Penticton local, is a biologist, author, educator, and former MP.  He will be sharing his decades of knowledge of birds in the South Okanagan and BC and the changes he's seen as climate impacts nature.

Dick was born and raised in Penticton in a family that loved nature and the outdoors.  He was Curator of the Cowan Vertebrate Museum at UBC for 17 years, then moved back to the Okanagan, where he spent 20 years as a consulting biologist and writer. 








He worked with Birds Canada, coordinating Canadian Christmas Bird Counts, the eBird program, the British Columbia Owl Survey and the British Columbia Breeding Bird Atlas.  Dick also served on the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, the British Columbia Environmental Appeal Board, the British Columbia Forest Appeals Commission and the board of the Nature Conservancy of Canada. 

He was a founding director of the Okanagan Similkameen Conservation Alliance and one of the founders of the Meadowlark Festival.  Dick has written over a dozen books on the natural history of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. In 2015 he moved from biology to politics and was the Member of Parliament for South Okanagan-West Kootenay for ten years.