Two Maine Audubon staffers were able to attend the National Audubon Society’s Audubon Leadership Conference in Montreal last month. The event was the first of its kind since 2016, and gathered over 400 staff, board members, and volunteers from Audubon chapters and partners across North, Central, and South America to make connections, share intel, and celebrate our work.
Maine Audubon’s Conservation Director, Sally Stockwell, and Advocacy and Outreach Manager, Nick Lund, both received scholarships to attend the conference. Maine Audubon has an important perspective as one of a handful of independent Audubons—that is, though we carry the “Audubon” name and share similar values and focus areas, we are not actually an official part of the National Audubon Society. Maine Audubon traces its history back to 1843, long before the National Audubon Society was formed in 1905, and has remained an independent organization ever since. Our status as an independent Audubon, along with organizations like Mass Audubon and New Jersey Audubon, means that we not only have a lot to learn from National Audubon, but also have new perspectives to share.
Below, both Sally and Nick share some of their thoughts and takeaways from a few days spent in the company of hundreds of other conservationists and birders.
Nick Lund, Advocacy and Outreach Manager
Perhaps my lasting impression is one of belonging. It was wonderful to look out at the massive dining room at the conference hotel and see it filled to the brim with people who care about the same things I do. Everyone was there because of their love of birds and their desire to protect them. There were conversations at every table: here, representatives from Audubon chapters in Kansas and Illinois swapped strategies for protecting Greater Prairie-chickens; there, staff from NYC Bird Alliance and Chicago Bird Alliance talked about the impacts of green roofs in their respective cities. Everywhere you went you were surrounded by people trying to help birds. It felt like a family.
There were many moments of connection. My favorite came when I randomly sat down next to a young woman during a lunch break. She said her name was Carmen Prieto, and she was a founder of the Santiago Canyon College Audubon chapter, part of National Audubon’s successful Audubon on Campus program. I explained that I was representing Maine Audubon and she lit up: “Oh!” she said, “I got into birding just a few years ago after attending Doug Hitchcox’s Birding Basics webinars on Zoom!” It was a delightful example of Maine Audubon’s unexpected reach.
I made many other connections throughout the trip. I was able to connect in-person with members of National Audubon’s policy team, including Jesse Walls, Zachary Spencer, and Felice Stadler, who have all been working closely with Maine Audubon’s advocacy team on federal Congressional issues. Felice took time out of her workshop on decisionmaker outreach to highlight the collaborative work between our organizations on federal tax credits, for example. Elsewhere, I was able to have separate conversations with representatives from NYC Bird Alliance and the Duval Audubon Society in Florida about our bird safe architecture work. Groups across the nation are at different points with their bird safe work. New York City passed a trailblazing ordinance, for example, while Duval Audubon Society, near Jacksonville, is just getting started figuring out its path forward. Information shared between all these groups helped us all move forward.
The conference was full of such moments of connection and shared passion, and I returned to Maine excited to get back to work.
Sally Stockwell, Conservation Director
I was particularly taken with the expanse of both attendees and programs National Audubon is working on now, several of which I was not familiar with, even though I regularly collaborate with Audubon staff from other states. To start with, Audubon has adopted a new Strategic Plan built around “Flight Plan” to “bend the bird curve” (i.e., reverse the loss of 3 billion birds since 1970), largely by connecting all Audubon folks not only across the U.S. but also indigenous groups in Canada, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. This includes working with native groups in Canada to protect boreal breeding grounds and indigenous communities in Mexico and Central and South America to protect wintering grounds for all those migratory birds that pass through the U.S. I was also pleased to break bread and go birding with new and old friends and colleagues, all of whom share a passion for birds and nature. On one field trip to a park outside Montreal, we were especially excited to witness a Merlin swoop down into a field and carry off a featherless sparrow chick back to its nest, where screaming young waited for their next meal.
Here are some more details on what I learned:
- National’s Boreal Program has been working with multiple indigenous communities to conserve very large swaths of native lands and are initiating monitoring and stewardship of those lands through educational programming, Acoustic Recording Units, drones, and water testing, much of which is conducted by trained young people called Land Guardians. For example, with Audubon’s help, four First Nations have banded together to work with the Canadian and Manitoba governments to permanently protect the 12.5 million-acre completely undeveloped Seal River Watershed in northern Manitoba. An area the size of Costa Rica, the watershed is invaluable breeding and migratory staging grounds for hundreds of species of birds, and is home to Beluga whales, barren-ground caribou, wolverines, and polar and grizzly bears. The Seal River Watershed Alliance was given an award for their amazing accomplishments.
- Conserva Aves was established in the past few years in collaboration with several organizations including Birds Canada and BirdLife International to work with local groups in Mexico, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and potentially Brazil to conserve a total of 4.9 million acres in 100 areas with high diversity and/or rare, endemic, or range-restricted species in areas particularly important to local native peoples and communities and adjacent to already protected lands. Tools for conservation vary by country. Partners provide staffing and funding support but the conservation efforts are all led by locals. One of the partners, RedLac, was given an award for their contributions to the program.
- Collectively, the Flight Plan has a goal of protecting 300 million acres across the Americas, or 10% of all the priority areas identified by Audubon and partners for protection. Those areas were based on the following criteria:
- Full annual life cycle priorities
- Endemic and range-restricted species in Central/South America
- Climate change stronghold
- Marine priorities
- Socially vulnerable
- I also heard about new digital mapping and storytelling resources Audubon has created that could be helpful for us in our efforts here in Maine. National Audubon has an ace data analytics/GIS team that has developed a whole suite of fascinating resources available for us to access around migratory pathways, priority locations for conservation, data for telling stories, story maps etc. Some of the resources mentioned in various talks that could be helpful for us include Migratory Bird Initiative (Audubon), Southern Wings, Who We Are (success stories from Birdlife International), and Bird Migration Explorer (Audubon data used to tell stories tailored to different flyways). You can find most of these on Audubon’s website.
- Finally, I was impressed with stories I heard from both volunteer, student, and small-staffed Audubon chapters about their efforts to promote Bird Safe windows, lights out campaigns, and native plantings, in addition to leading bird walks and presentations.
Many thanks to National Audubon for hosting this conference, bringing together committed conservationists from across the Americas, and for including Maine Audubon and other independent Audubons in the family gathering.
