Who Am I
My name is Winston Wente and I am a birder living in Longmont, CO. I have always been interested in nature and have been jumping around different areas of recreational nature related activities including rock collecting, succulent growing, and eventually birding. I have been birding since I was 8 years old and I got hooked right around my 9th birthday. I remember my first birding trip, which was at Walden Ponds Wildlife Habitat in Boulder, CO. I went with my teacher Joni Perry, who was the person who got me into watching birds using bird feeders and a 45 minute recess to watch birds every day. Slowly my passion grew and soon enough I got into bird photography, around the age of 10. I keep my pictures on a Flickr account (see https://www.flickr.com/photos/winstonbirdphotos/)Now I travel around Colorado whenever I can convince my parents to take me - in search of birds. My family is very big into goal setting, and so I set many goals around birds. In 2025, I set a goal to see all of Colorado's 11 species of owl and I made a book about it (to view an online copy, please visit https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IxGFKCk7OKovKfe-ECDC9RTYw1HeY_sa/view).
My Capstone Project
My school has everyone in 6th grade do a capstone project to represent their time there. So it didn't take much to pick birds as a subject, but choosing what about birds to focus my project on took more brain power. I knew I wanted to try and raise awareness for a bird at risk but I couldn't figure out what bird to work with. So I started narrowing down my options: I wanted to work with a bird that I could drive to in a few hours and I wanted a bird that was on the prairie, because that's the habitat I live on. That still left a few options, so that's where Joni came in. She was no longer my teacher but she still came by the school most days, and she had been to a Prairie Chicken lek before. I told her my ideas for a capstone and she suggested Prairie Chickens. So I did Prairie Chickens.
The Project
The capstone project started in August 2026, in which I started to learn all I could about prairie chickens, their behavior, their habitat and their conservation status. Come November though, my capstone stalled out and I worked on other things. Then in January, Joni helped us all get our capstones back from a point where we just wouldn't like to do it. Just like that, we were working on our capstones almost every day. We needed to make a power point that was 5-7 minutes long and I also wanted to make a website. So at home I worked on my website and at school I worked on my PowerPoint. Soon enough, I was ready to publish my website and my PowerPoint was 25 minutes. so then I added some finishing touches to my website and published it, and I prepared for my presentation. And that is where I am at now.