Dear Michigan Audubon members and community,

At around this time last year — during the fall migration of the ever-memorable year 2020 — many people were remarking about picking up birdwatching as a formal hobby for the first time. From beginning birders in the pandemic who launched themselves first into fantasy birding to a surge in backyard bird feeding, the art and fun of birdwatching certainly got a lot of attention throughout the pandemic. I read recently that the popular National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America has been flying off the (virtual) shelves, almost doubling in sales over the past two years. This is great news for people and birds, and as members of Michigan Audubon, we invite you to give the gift of membership to someone in your circle who is new to birds or a lifelong birder.

I want to take a moment and thank Rosann Kovalcik, owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Grosse Pointe and Michigan Audubon board member, for steadily supplying donated birdseed to keep our feeding station going at Whitefish Point!

From an organizational perspective, we’ve seen other facets of birding grow: advocacy, social justice, and the more invisible, community-relevant connections that exist between people and birds. A few examples of this are Black Birders Week and increased efforts to better represent and be effectively inclusive to people of color in the natural resources field as well as in outdoor recreation, birding, and ecology.

Michigan Audubon’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Advisory Council is rooted and growing! From collaborating with the Michigan Indigenous Peoples Council to helping protect and conserve the Eastern Sandhill Crane to planning our first birding tour of the Eastern U.P. for the BIPOC community this coming winter, we couldn’t be more excited to see our mission at work in new, expansive ways for people and birds.

The council was formed/inspired by the call to action of the inaugural #BlackBirdersWeek in 2020. I want to give many thanks to our volunteers, Dr. April Campbell, featured in this issue’s Community Spotlight, and to newly elected board secretary and DEI Advisory Council member, Sam Burckhardt, for their service and support of this growing work.

Michigan Audubon chapter leaders, we highly recommend checking out the resources and reading list on page 13. Compiled by Campbell of the DEI Advisory Council, this list offers several great, carefully selected titles. (If you aren’t a chapter leader or member, these titles are solid, suggested reading!). Take, for example, J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal.

You’ll notice that our executive committee of the Michigan Audubon board has recently changed, which is updated on the inside cover. Congratulations to longtime board member Natasha Koss for her election to the board chair position! “I am thrilled to be in this leadership role of Michigan’s oldest conservation organization and one that is at the forefront of bird protection. It only feels natural to step into this position as I follow in the footsteps of my father, former board president Jack Lapinski.”

In this final issue of the calendar year, we end our feature focus on wind energy developments in Michigan as they relate to our organization’s mission and chapter network. It’s no question that the need for clean, alternative energy is greater than ever and that the developments we make must take migratory pathways, the connectedness of habitats, and on-the-ground conservation efforts into account.

As we plan for 2022, we continue to adapt our program and in-person offerings based on CDC public health recommendations. Our annual Spring Fling event again will not take place in 2022 because of the lack of available local accommodations for guests of the event. Our smaller weekend tours, Cerulean Warbler tours in southwest Michigan, Kirtland’s Warbler tours in Grayling, and our hawk and waterbird counts will continue throughout 2022.

Lastly, we want to share with you all a big thank you for signing the petition to keep the Sandhill Crane off the game species list in Michigan. I spoke to the Natural Resources Commission on behalf of Michigan Audubon at their Oct. 14 meeting. I urge you to visit michiganaudubon.org/blog if you want to read the full story and learn more about our advocacy work and how to exercise your voice for birds. As always, our staff posts updates to social media and through our eNews to keep you connected to bird-related news in Michigan.

Thank you for being a member and for sustaining your membership. It backs our advocacy work for birds and keeps our organization growing and able to achieve its mission, reach more people, and do more for building bird-friendly communities in Michigan.

Sincerely,

Heather Good
Executive Director

This article appeared in the 2021 Fall Jack Pine Warbler.

Featured photo: Sandhill Cranes roosting together during fall migration. Photo by Jan Lewis