Katie McGee is a lifelong animal lover and self proclaimed bird nerd.  She has a decade of experience planning elaborate international wildlife viewing trips that often include volunteering stints with local rehabilitation or conservation organizations.  Some of her favorite places in the world are Madagascar and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  (You can read about some of these adventures in her books The Sharks of Mexico, Reniala, and Maetang To Koh Chang, available on Amazon.)  

She works at Newport Aquarium as a Dive Technician and has the privilege of SCUBA diving with some amazing animals, such as Arapaima, Sharkrays, and Denver the Loggerhead Sea Turtle.  Before that, she worked with her favorite animals, dogs, for twelve years at Kyle Veterinary Hospital in southwest Ohio.  She volunteers extensively with wildlife, from monitoring Monarch butterflies to bottle feeding orphaned raccoons.  She is currently studying zoology at Oregon State University and training to become a bird bander.

Katie began birding seriously after her first trip to Madagascar in 2019, where she was so impressed by the knowledge of her guides that she wanted to pursue becoming a birding guide herself.  She enrolled in the master naturalist course for her home state, Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist, and started guiding bird walks at her local nature center in 2021.  In 2025, Katie attended a professional development course for women birding guides at Panama’s renowned Canopy Lodge led by Big Year record breaking birder Tiffany Kersten.  Shortly after, Katie started her company, Chance Expeditions, with the goal of building well researched wildlife viewing blitz itineraries geared towards small groups of birders interested in seeing all the wildlife a destination has to offer.