Bill Hilton Jr. is an educator-naturalist with more than 30 years of teaching and research experience in schools, colleges, and outdoor learning centers. He was twice named South Carolina Science Teacher of the Year and helped start the residential South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics. In 1991 Hilton received a Cooperative Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct environmental education research. Today he travels the U.S. training classroom and informal educators to use innovative cross-disciplinary techniques to excite students about science learning. Hilton is executive director of Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History, a non-profit education, research, and conservation organization he founded in 1982 in York, South Carolina USA. He is also principal investigator for 'Operation RubyThroat: The Hummingbird Project,' the Center's award-winning and NSF-funded outreach initiative that uses Ruby-throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) to excite K-12 students about science learning (www.rubythroat.org). Since 1984 Hilton has captured and banded more than 3,300 hummingbirds just at Hilton Pond to study their migration, longevity, and site fidelity. Each winter he leads trips for teachers and citizen scientists for an unprecedented study of ruby-throats on their wintering grounds in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. Hilton lectures throughout North America and writes nature articles for various publications; he authors a regular series of photo essays--some about pollinators--under 'This Week at Hilton Pond' on the Center's web site (www.hiltonpond.org). He is an active conservationist and was named 'Guardian of the Environment' by The Charlotte Observer in 1998.