Keynote Dinner
2027 Keynote Dinner Speaker
Bob Friedrichs
Robert (Bob) Friedrichs and his wife Ruth live in Palacios, Texas and have one grown son. Bob holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University. His 34-year career with Chevron included a variety of management positions. Now retired, Bob and Ruth enjoy traveling around North America in their RV, and in 2018, one of those adventures included driving their motorhome to Alaska, and back! That American ‘safari’ featured some awesome sightseeing and amazing birding. They now look forward to spending the summer in a small adobe in Costilla, NM where Ruth’s mom grew up. The cool mountain air is a welcome relief from the heat and humidity of the Texas Gulf Coast. And then there are the abundant critters, especially birds and butterflies, of the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Bob is an outdoor enthusiast, conservationist and avid birder who started birding at age 13 while a member of the Golden Crescent Nature Club in Victoria, Texas. His life list contains 2247 species of birds, and ABA area list includes 772 species. Bob has seen 585 species in Texas and 360 species in Matagorda County. He is a certified Texas Master Naturalist with the Midcoast Chapter and spends much of his time in the field, volunteering to conduct bird tours and bird surveys. He is a member of the Texas Ornithological Society Century Club, having seen at least 100 species in over 100 of the 254 counties in Texas. He leads birding field trips for the Whooping Crane Festival in Port Aransas, the Matagorda Bay BirdFest in Palacios and the Laredo Birdfest.
His field work includes Colonial Waterbird Surveys in the bay systems of Calhoun and Matagorda Counties, Texas and annual USGS Breeding Bird Surveys. He has also supported Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) efforts to band wintering sparrows in Brazoria County and to survey Buff-breasted Sandpipers on the coastal plain to better understand habitat use, migration patterns and population estimates. Bob is a past-president of the Board of Directors of Gulf Coast Bird Observatory and has served on the Palacios Prairie Wetland Board.
Bob compiles the Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC) in Jackson-Calhoun Counties and the Victoria, Texas CBC, which he started as a young man of 17 years back in 1978.
Dinner with Guest Chef
Chef Robert Mayberry
A fifth generation Texan, Chef Robert was drawn to the kitchen as a boy; learning southern cooking from his mother and grandmother as well as Tex Mex & BBQ from his father. He worked in bakeries and restaurants across Texas before heading to the west coast to attend the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. Graduating with honors, Robert apprenticed with chefs on the west coast and in Santa Fe before returning home to Austin in 1989.
Over the next 14 years, Robert worked as a chef in bakeries, hotels and restaurants in the Austin area. He served as Executive Chef at Dell’s Round Rock Campus in the late 90s and in 2003 became Campus Executive Chef at The University of Texas at Austin where an average of 20,000 meals were served daily. In 16 years there, Robert developed menus and recipes to support student dietary needs while training kitchen staff to prepare multinational cuisines and contemporary foods. He also assisted in the establishment of campus food gardens, worked with local farmers, developed grab-and-go menus and supported culinary training for nine campus chefs through the American Culinary Federation.
Robert retired from UT in 2019 and continues to operate his Chef Robert Catering business. He enjoys gardening, foraging for wild edibles and supporting small farmers. An avid outdoorsman and camp cook, he loves fishing, hiking, camping and sampling local brews with friends and family.
