Northern Wings – Connecting People and Birds of Northern Arizona

A Conversation with Nancy Steele, President of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society

• Northern Arizona Audubon Society • Season 1 • Episode 9

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In this episode, NAAS member Matt Anderson interviews Nancy Steele, President of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society, regarding her love for birds, wildlife and nature, the path she’s taken to her current position, and the organization’s accomplishments, plans, and connections with birders and communities in Northern Arizona.  

This conversation was recorded in August 2025 and mentions a few activities that are now in the past.  For current information on everything from bird walks to volunteer opportunities to Motus pings, visit Northern Arizona Audubon Society’s website. 

We are grateful to William W.H. Gunn and the Macaulay Library, at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for the clip used in the Name That Birdsong segment of the podcast.  

Relevant Links:

https://motus.org/

https://www.northernarizonaaudubon.org/

https://northernarizonaaudubon.org/page-18090 (events)

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website and subscribe to our Instagram feed.

The Northern Arizona Audubon Society has been the voice for birds in Northern Arizona since 1972. Join us. Add your voice.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome. This podcast is brought to you by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society, the voice for birds in Northern Arizona since 1972. We envision a future in which birds are thriving in Northern Arizona and throughout the world. Visit our website to learn more about this dynamic organization and the work it does for the love of birds and nature, especially in our part of the world. Hi, and welcome to this podcast. My name is Matt Anderson. Today I've got the great pleasure of talking with Nancy Steele, the current president of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society, about a wide range of topics, from her connections with birds and nature to the organization's activities, past, present, and future. Welcome, Nancy.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

Let's start off talking a little bit about the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. Tell me a little bit about its mission and how it's organized.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. And I just have to first say that I am so excited to be part of this podcast. Wonderful to hear. Thank you. And the podcasts you've we've recorded so far have been fantastic. And so I highly recommend people listen to all of the podcasts that we've had so far. But Northern Arizona Audubon Society, who asked about the organization. It's been around for quite a long time. And I believe it became a chapter of the National Audubon Society in 1972, but didn't incorporate until a little while later. So we actually have sort of three different origin dates for it. But today it's a membership organization that engages people in appreciating and protecting birds and the places they live. So we want a world in which there's a lot of birds and a lot of bird diversity, and that we see birds everywhere in northern Arizona.

SPEAKER_00:

Perfect. That sounds like a great goal. And you've got a beautifully written strategic plan that helps express how you intend to do some of those things, and a wonderful website that people can go to, Northern ArizonaAudubon.org, and find out more about the organization's mission and people who are making it happen. The society has got an active presence in social media as well. And I'm always impressed by the number and quality of events that the organization hosts. What are some examples of the activities supported by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society in the local communities?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. The organization is all about creating a community around birds. And so to that end, we have membership meetings where we educate people, have speakers come in and talk about birds, talk about birding, and talk about bird science, a variety of different topics. We also have field trips, and that's probably the place where people interact with us the most, is they either find out through meetup or going on our website or looking at Facebook that we have an opportunity coming up where they can go out and walk around with a bunch of other people and an expert in birds and learn about birds. So field trips so far we've had this year, we've already had about 60 to 65 field trips. We've already taken out over 600 people on field trips, and the year isn't even done. So that's uh that's one of the major ways people interact with us. But another thing that's important that is not as maybe as widely known is that we also do community science projects in the sense that we're out there monitoring birds, counting birds. So we do things like breeding bird surveys, um, water bird surveys, we do pinyon jay surveys. Pinyon jay is a bird of specific uh special concern because of declining numbers. So we participate in counting pinyon jays and keeping track of them for all sorts of reasons. We'll go out to heron rookeries and look for how many heron nests there are, count them. So we're actually contributing to the science and the knowledge of how many birds there are out there.

SPEAKER_00:

And how are these data used? I know with Nest Watch, for example, it's aggregated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithologies Nest Watch program. How is some of the other data used?

SPEAKER_01:

Birders are part of the biggest, most long-lasting science or community science project in the world, in the sense that you don't have to be an expert to do research. You just have to be knowledgeable. So when we do these counts, they are sent out. A lot of it goes directly to Cornell. People submit eBird lists when they go on trips or even just sit in your backyard. You can count the birds you see, identify them, and put them in an e-bird list. That data all gets aggregated and then is used by researchers to put together a state of the birds report. Those state of the birds reports come out on a regular basis. And the message they're telling us is not happy. Birds are declining. One report that came out a few years ago said that since 1972 there are three billion fewer birds in the United States than there should be if the numbers of birds had been stable since 1972.

SPEAKER_00:

That's surprising and frightening.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Actually, in that report, water birds, ducks, were actually doing pretty good. And so were hawks and eagles. The next report that came out said that water birds weren't doing so good. So it's really important to do these reports year over year. But you can take lessons from what you see. If grassland birds are declining, for example, we can look at what's happening with habitat around the hemisphere. So it's not just when you see birds here in the United States, where are they wintering? And is their wintering habitat being taken away? And if that's happening, then maybe we need to shift and do some of our conservation work in the southern hemisphere. So it can tell us information like that that we can actually use to improve habitat for birds, improve bird conditions, which by extension improves conditions for wildlife and our planet.

SPEAKER_00:

Beautiful. That's a nice overview of the state of bird populations. What are you seeing in northern Arizona? Is it the same?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, declining birds. I don't have specific data for Northern Arizona because that's not how the data has been compiled. But my sense is, and I think anyone who's been out birding for a long time, many years, will say the same thing is that we are often seeing fewer birds when they do come.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's been my experience at Kachina wetlands over the past decade. So, in addition to the exciting bird counts and things like that that Northern Arizona Audubon Society has engaged in, you recently implemented two MODIS stations here in Northern Arizona, which provide some additional exciting capabilities. Can you talk about those a little bit?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, and that is actually one of the most exciting things that Northern Arizona Audubon has been doing, and it's what drew me to the organization. I am a science nerd also. As you said, we installed two stations, one above the rim and one right by the river, by the Verde River, I should say. The goal of those stations really is to provide that information we need for birds on migration. Where are they stopping? Where are they feeding? Where are they resting? That information has really not been available for the vast majority of birds. We have not known what they needed on migration. So we knew where they live in the winter, we know where they live in the summer, we know they travel a long way, and you can band birds, right? With banding, bird banding's been going on forever, right? And so if you recapture a bird that has a band, you have some data. But with MODIS, we can have continuous data all along the migratory route, and we can find out where they are going in between their winter and summer homes. So, for example, on our station up on Anderson Mesa, so we installed these stations in late fall, early winter. So we were hoping to get spring migrants. And we did get three individual birds that came through the Anderson Mesa site: a tree swallow, an American white pelican, and a flamulated owl. We know where those specific birds were tagged, and we know where they went on their migration, and soon we're gonna have a whole year of data on them when they come back to the place where they were initially tagged. On the Verde River, we had one bird fly past that station, a northern shoveler. And again, you know, that gives us some information about the birds and the migratory routes they're using. So, how are we gonna use that data? So we have a series of wildlife preserves in this country, and we have places that have been conserved as, say, national forests or national parks. Are they all in the right places that we need to ensure that birds have enough habitat to survive on their migration route? You know, what's happening to them while they migrate. And I think a good example of that is the fact that Arizona does not have well, let me back up a second. We don't know a lot about the birds that migrate through Arizona. Arizona is on the edge of the Pacific Flyway and the Central Flyway, and it's pretty understudied. In fact, I think all of the arid states are understudied as far as birds, because we don't have the sheer volume of birds that you see in the eastern part of the country and on the coast. But there are birds that migrate through Arizona. So what do they need? And what places in Arizona need to be preserved for those birds to survive?

SPEAKER_00:

Just speaking from experience down in Southeast Arizona, the sandhill cranes uh using that area as part of their migration is maybe one of the most impressive sights I've seen in the sky, where tens of thousands of those birds are in the air squawking, making noise, and actually uh generating uh percussive uh elements in the wind that you can feel it as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Most birds migrate at night, so we don't see it at all. And the data that's being used with remote sensing is turning up some pretty incredible information about how birds migrate.

SPEAKER_00:

And for people who want to learn more about MODIS and how these two sites were developed, we have the first episode of uh Northern Wings. We talk with Kay and Rick about their activities to make these things real. And I think a delightful interview with those two. They're just really wonderful people and advocates for birds and a lot of interesting information about the technical aspects of MODIS too.

SPEAKER_01:

Let me tell you just one more resource though. If you want to go to modus.org, M-O-T-U-S.org, and the way I usually find it is I go to that website and then I click on stations.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

And up pops a map, and then I just expand the map to Arizona, and then I can find and I kind of know like where the Anderson Mesa station is, so but as you put your cursor over the dot, it'll tell you the name of the station. So you can actually track our specific stations by going to modus.org.

SPEAKER_00:

And from those stations you can track the birds that have been pinged there. Yes. And that in itself is just a fascinating exercise.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So I've had the good fortune to attend several bird walks hosted by the Society in the Flagstaff area, and have found the guides to be exceptional and the other birders inspirational. So these experiences provide a glimpse into some of the activity supported by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. But you've got more preserves than that in this part of the world. So you've got four. Can you tell us about those?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the preserves are interesting because this isn't habitat that Northern Arizona Audubon Society owns, but these are landscapes that we steward and ensure and help the owners to manage them better for birds. So there's four of them. Bubbling Ponds, which is in Page Springs and is connected with the Arizona Game and Fish Department's Page Springs Fish Hatchery. And that one is probably our biggest one. It's got nice trails. It's a really great place to wander around and look at birds both along the river and in the area of the fish hatchery. You'll often see ducks and great blue herons, for example. In the spring and summer, there's usually at least one common black hawk nesting, maybe more. So that's a really, really good one. The Sedona Wetlands is owned by the City of Sedona and it is actually a treatment wetland. It was designed by the City of Sedona to reuse water that has been treated and that flows out of the adjacent treatment plant. And when it was created, so this was quite a while ago, because I think it opened around 2013. When it was created, members of Northern Arizona Audubon Society said, let's put in all native vegetation, let's create these ponds so that they're able to be attractive to birds. And they worked in partnership. People like Anita McFarlane worked in partnership with the city of Sedona to create that wetlands preserve. So we again we work in partnership with Sedona to ensure that there's interpretive signage and trails, and we conduct both bird walks. And also another really great thing that we do there is our steward about every about every two weeks during from September through May, he sets up a spotting scope on a platform overlooking a great big pond where you can see ducks and shorebirds. So that's a fantastic and really easy thing for people to do, especially if somebody is not able to walk very well or very far. They can use a chair, wheelchair, or walker to get out there, then they can watch birds through the spotting scope. Up north in the Flagstaff area, there's two more. The Kachina Wetlands, which is south of Flagstaff, is again a treatment wetlands for the Kachina Village Improvement District. And I mean you hardly even notice it. It's just this great big area with grass and flowers and trees. And I was just there recently for on a bird walk, and we saw, yeah, we saw so many birds. It's fantastic. And then the fourth one is the Picture Canyon Natural and Cultural Preserve in Flagstaff. There's a small wetlands associated with that that receives wastewater from one of the city of Flagstaff's treatment plants. Again, a great place to see birds using water all times of the year, but especially from the spring through the fall.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice. And those are some sites for more research. Yes. Matt Jenkins is doing bluebird research in Kachina wetlands. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, yeah, lots of bluebird boxes set up in the Kachina wetlands.

SPEAKER_00:

There are, and as well in uh Picture Canyon. In Picture Canyon, uh Dr. Paul Doherty is doing research on buntings in that area too. So even though seeing all these beautiful, this beautiful wildlife and having great walking experiences, there's a lot of serious science going on behind the scenes there too.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah, and also I sh I would be remiss if I didn't mention that at Bubbling Ponds at the Page Spring Fish Hatchery, there's also a butterfly garden. We do a lot with our partner, the butterfly enthusiasts of Northern Arizona. So I'm going to ask about those in just a second. So our steward for bubbling ponds, Rob Gibbs, is actually married to the person who is in charge of that butterfly garden. So we had two stewards in one there, Denise Gibbs and Rob Gibbs.

SPEAKER_00:

I noticed on the Northern Arizona Audubon Society website that you've got a fine listing of all the events coming up. And I saw Becky Hardy is uh scheduled to do a butterfly walk there this month, and looking forward to joining that if I can.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And that's another area of science research that is pretty fascinating in just getting started. Our two MODIS stations. We just added butterfly receivers to them.

SPEAKER_00:

That's exciting.

SPEAKER_01:

People are actually putting tags on monarch butterflies. And I've heard also dragonflies, although I don't know that that's in Arizona, but they are tagging monarchs, and we have the receivers up, and we're hoping over time that we will be able to start collecting data on monarchs on their migration through the Verde Valley. And that'd be just excellent. That'll be amazing.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, kudos for that. That's a big step forward, too. So we talked about the butterfly enthusiasts of Northern Arizona really briefly. Can you tell us a little bit more how Northern Arizona Audubon Society is connected with those kinds of organizations, communities, and other entities, partnerships to improve the status of birds in the places they need.

SPEAKER_01:

I think we all recognize that if you're providing habitat for birds, you're providing habitat for lots of other wildlife too, right? And in fact, uh when we were doing our most recent strategic plan, there was a lot of conversation about should we say birds and wildlife, birds and wildlife when we're talking. And we ended up settling on birds, knowing that most people understand that birds and wildlife go together. But caterpillars grow up to become moths and butterflies, and what's a good food source for many birds? Caterpillars. And they'll even eat butterflies and moths too. I think the more rich an environment is, the more animals it it supports. And we all learned about the food chain when we were little, predators and prey. It's important to have that entire species richness that produces not just birds, but the insects that they eat, the seeds that they eat on the plants that are growing, that the caterpillars are eating, that you know, that then the birds can eat. And then the predator birds, like, you know, hawks and eagles, then eat the fish and the birds that are part of that habitat too. So to repeat a cliche, it's a circle of life.

SPEAKER_00:

We've come to a point in our podcast we're gonna add a little fun activity to the mechs. And I'm really excited about this, Nancy, because this was your idea months ago, and we've implemented it, the bird song identification segment. And it's I've really enjoyed it. Uh so we're gonna play the song of a bird comet, Arizona, and the listener's job is to identify it, and we're gonna reveal a species at the end of the podcast. So here we go. Now back to our conversation with Nancy Steele, the president of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. So, Nancy, it seems like birds are a very important part of your life. You've vacationed in ways that brought you in touch with birds. I'm sitting here at your lovely dining room table, feeling like I should be putting together an e-bird list for all the birds that are visiting uh your lovely feeders here. What was your path to becoming the president of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh gosh, that's such a long and winding path because birds were not my first love at all. I grew up in Phoenix in the 60s, 70s, uh, at a time when uh, you know, the the term free-range child was not used, but that's essentially what we were, right? I was a part of the generation where parents literally said, go outside and play, and they didn't worry about where we were. And we showed up when we showed up at uh mealtimes. Um but in addition to that, it my family did a lot of hiking and backpacking. They loved the out of doors, like so many people who live in Arizona do. My mom was my Girl Scout leader, and we were a hiking backpacking troupe. So our big trip every year was to go down the Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon, have a soup eye, Perea Canyon. I've done all those when I was a kid. And I would go to a summer camp on the rim or up in Prescott or somewhere in the wild outdoors. That that was the way I grew up. But I didn't really develop a love of birds, as I've said, until much later in life. And I I've I've thought about this because other people have asked me this question. It's like, why didn't I really? Care about birds. It's my I knew I wanted to be a biologist in sixth grade, and I fell in love with jellyfish of all things. Did not obviously become a marine scientist, but I did become a biologist. But I think it was things like my brothers that they would find baby birds, you probably mockingbirds or doves, you know, that had fallen out of a nest, and they would try to keep them alive and they would always die. Or, you know, there was the mockingbird that I would see dive bombing my cat and I would get mad at the mockingbird. Or my grandfather would make negative comments about the doves that he heard constantly cooing from, you know, morning to nighttime that he could hear through his air vent. And so I just kept hearing and having sort of these negative experiences. But there were a couple of people that I could call out, two professors in particular, that kind of started me on the path of thinking birds were okay and maybe I should look at them, give them a second chance. One was my biology teacher at Occidental College, Dr. Luis Baptista, whose field of study was understanding how birds acquire their songs. And his main study bird was the white-crowned sparrow. So Dr. Baptista was so good at this, he could listen to a white-crowned sparrow, and he could tell you where its mother and its father were raised through the combination of their accents, so to speak, I guess you could say. Anyway, he was very formative. He taught us animal behavior, and he was just a fascinating person. Another formative professor was when I was at Arizona State University for my master's, uh, Ron Rutowski, I took the animal behavior laboratory class from him, and we spent many weeks recording and analyzing. Can I call it a song? The sound that a cactus wren makes.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

It's not really a song. A lot of the labs were about birds. And I thought, well, maybe birds are interesting. And I even joined the Pasadena Audubon Society when I was in living in the Pasadena area, but I didn't go to very many meetings and I never went on a walk. So it didn't all really click until I came here to the Verde Valley and joined Friends of the Verde River as their executive director. And Friends is the organization that hosts the Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival. And I decided, kind of a strange thing, that instead of working that weekend, I would take that off and I would be on field trips. So I would sign up for all these field trips to learn about birds. And I discovered this incredible community of people that are all interesting, creative, giving. I mean, you can walk up to a birder and say, What are you looking at? And they'll tell you. They'll hand you their binoculars. I've walked up to people who are looking through spotting scopes and they they step away and say, Look through my spotting scope and see what I'm looking at. And that's really quite special. And you don't see that in all fields, right? Oftentimes people are not as giving and generous as birders are. So that kind of was my path to birding. Now, my whole career, I have worked in the nonprofit sector on water and land conservation. When I retired from Friends of the Verde River in January of 2024, you know, I was thinking, what am I going to do with my life when I'm retired? And I had heard from a bunch of people this advice that you do nothing, you commit to nothing the first year after you retire, so that you can just decompress and find out, you know, like what is it that you really love, maybe what will pop up. So I thought, I'll do that. I'll do nothing for a year. And that lasted for about three months. And uh I knew Kay Hockley, I had been, who was then the president of Northern Arizona Audubon, and we'd had a lot of conversations, and she, of course, started recruiting me to join the board right away as soon as I was retired. And you know, other organizations asked me to join their board, but what was different about Northern Arizona Audubon Society was the vision. And the vision of installing the motor stations, participating in bird science, getting more people out to learn about birds, and through that means to get participating in bird conservation. And since all my life I'd been doing river and land conservation, it was really kind of a fun thing to then make a kind of a sidestep and say, instead of land and water, how about a specific animal, a specific taxon of animals? So if we focus on birds themselves, how can we get more people involved in conservation? How can we have a better chance of preserving birds and by extension all of the wildlife that comes with that? And so she convinced me, and I joined the board as vice president, and kind of, you know, felt the organization out to decide whether I would want to take over from Kay when she was termed out, term limited, so to speak, when she left the position of president. And I liked what I saw, I liked what was happening, and so I became president in January of 2025. And then my house in LA burned down. But that's another story. Yeah, I I almost I almost resigned. But then I decided that in addition to project managing the rebuilding of my house in uh Altadena, that if I stayed on as the president of this really fine organization, it would mean that I wasn't just focusing on something that, you know, really at its roots was so negative the the fact that my house and community on in air in California burned down. So I have a positive thing to look for.

SPEAKER_00:

You've done some great things with this organization since you took over the helm. What do you see as the biggest challenges that nonprofit organizations are facing in this current environment?

SPEAKER_01:

That can be boiled down into two things: volunteerism and funding. The nonprofits are a special kind of a business, and they are a business. But they're a kind of business where any profits generated by the organization goes to the mission, not to an individual person, not to shareholders, but back into the mission. So when you're running any kind of a business, right, you need to have capital, you need to have funding coming in. And for Northern Arizona Audubon Society, that is primarily membership and secondarily donations. And then until quite recently, we really haven't had much in the way of grants. In order to keep this organization running, we have to increase membership and we have to increase donations and we have to increase grants, right? But people aren't joining organizations the way they used to. Membership nationwide, not just in an organization like ours, but membership nationwide is declining. You know, I don't quite know. There there's people way smarter than me that have studied this, that have made it the subject of their life's work. And so I have I have read that this is, again, not a local thing, it's a it's a national thing that people don't join organizations the way they used to anymore. And that goes along with the second thing, which is volunteerism. This organization is pretty much all volunteer. We just recently hit a major milestone in that we've hired an executive director, but at the same time, this organization runs on volunteers. And I would say most nonprofits, in sheer numbers, are run by volunteers. And again, along with memberships, people are volunteering less. So fewer people are doing more work. So I'm painting a picture that maybe doesn't sound very hopeful, but I am a hopeful person and I'm a naturally optimistic person, and I think we have a special kind of an organization, and we're in a special place, a special part of the world where we have strong volunteers, people that have been volunteering with the organization for some of them for decades. It's always a challenge to bring new people in, but I am seeing new people joining this organization. So that gives me hope. And I'm seeing new people volunteer for the organization. One of our special initiatives that I'm really excited about is focusing more and more on students and bringing them and young adults and bringing them along. So we have young adults and students on our board. We have encouraged, reached out and encouraged people to become field trip guides who might, even people who might not have thought they were quite good enough or they're a little concerned about their skills, we'll help train you. You know, if you want to be a field trip guide and you know birds, we'll help train you in what it means to be a field trip guide. And we also offer a stipend. It's a small amount of money,$50, but we offer a stipend to our field trip guides, and that has increased the number of young adults who are willing to come out and guide and help you learn about birds. So there's little things that we're doing to try and bring more people into this organization, and I think that is going to help, it's going to help us, it's going to help the birds. We know that conservation organizations tend to be older and wider, right? That's that's been a complaint, an observation, not just a complaint, it's been an observation for for decades. There has been a call to bring more people and more diversity into conservation organizations, and we're doing that here at Northern Arizona Audubon. So that makes me very excited for the organization.

SPEAKER_00:

And I see that in the makeup of the attendees at some of these bird walks and some of the younger bird guides are phenomenal. And it makes me want to come back every time to listen to what they have and to come back and see their own trajectories as they move on into great places in the world, I know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and it's always fun when uh we do self-introductions at the beginning of every uh trip. And it's always fun when somebody says, This is the first time I've ever done this. This is the first bird walk I've ever been on. I love that.

SPEAKER_00:

And so people who want to identify bird walks that are scheduled can easily go to the Northern Arizona Audubon Society website and find those.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, they're on our calendar. We have a calendar of events. And you can also uh if you join Meetup, I think it's called something like Sedona Verde Valley Flagstaff Birding. I think if you look up that and meetup, search for that in Meetup, you'll find our meetup group. So we always also do that.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. And I can leave a link to that in the show notes for this episode. So we've talked about how people can find more information about the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. What are some things that people can do to help support the organization? You've identified a couple. Consider volunteering, consider donating, consider becoming members. Anything else that comes to mind in that area?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think by by the act of coming on a bird walk, coming to a member meeting, learning more, even if it takes you a little while before you decide whether you want to join or or give, we love having you there and we love meeting you, and we want you to come. And no pressure, right? No pressure. Everything we do is free. Back in the fall of 2024, the board of directors of NAS came together on a strategic planning retreat. And of course, there's a lot of work that goes into one of those things, right? She's you want to interview people and gather data about the organization, and then you give that information to the organization board members, and then we come up with what our mission and vision and goals and all of that are the whole nine yards for strategic planning. But we put together this what we believe statement, which I'd like to read because I think it I think it's important and really gives people an idea of who we are and why we exist. So if you'll indulge me, I'll read that statement. So we at Northern Arizona Audubon Society, we believe that birds have intrinsic value and that humanity must provide birds with respect, safety, and places to live. Bird conservation is important for people and the planet. Getting people out birding and teaching people about birds helps with bird conservation and improves human health too. The more people who are involved in birding, the better. Northern Arizona Audubon Society is open to everyone. It is an inclusive birding organization for people of all ages, skill levels, genders, identities, and ethnicity. NAAS works to attract more people to birding.

SPEAKER_00:

That's beautifully written. And I see the agency promoting that in so many different ways. Thank you for sharing that. So one of the important missions or subgoals of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society is advocacy for birds. How do you does the organization pursue accomplishing that goal? And what can listeners do to help?

SPEAKER_01:

That's a really good question. I think Audubon itself was formed out of advocacy for birds, and Northern Arizona Audubon is no different. There were some real challenges to habitat and birds habitat here in Arizona that in our early years we participated in lobbying activities and advocacies like the Arizona Wilderness Act and advocacy for the Lower Verde River being a wild and scenic river. So one of the things that we think is real important is to advocate for birds and bird habitat at the local, state, and federal levels. And I've talked about in this podcast, I've talked about our work with preserves, which is a form of advocacy at the local level, right? Ensuring that there is habitat for birds at those preserves and at other places locally. But it's also important to advocate at the state and federal levels. And what we're doing now mostly is signing on as an organization to letters, either in support of or in opposition to changes at the state and federal levels. We'd like to get our members more involved in that. And to that extent, that's something that we're going to be rolling out over the next few months, is an opportunity where people can see when their voice can be helpful and can take action if they so choose by sending an email or a letter to their elected representative. So we're hoping to tie that more closely together with our members and give them those opportunities. We also always go down to the state legislature at least once a year for an advocacy day for birds. And that's real important. And if anyone who's listening wants to get more involved in that, feel free to contact me directly.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, thank you for that. That's great information. Okay, it's time to reveal the name of the species singing the beautiful song earlier in the episode. Nancy, I love this addition to the podcast. And since it was your idea, you get the honor of letting us know what we heard.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, everybody. I hope you were able to identify this bird, but if not, no worries. It's a bird that often confuses me because it has so many different beautiful songs and calls. It's the curve-build thrasher, a bird typical of the deserts, high deserts, and in the Verde Valley in the American Southwest and northern Mexico. And again, we are grateful, I am grateful, to the William WH Gunn and the Macaulay Library, part of Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, for the use of this curved-billed thrasher clip.

SPEAKER_00:

Nancy, that was so well done. I think we're going to have to get you back to do all of these reveals. I love that. Thank you for that. So, Nancy, we've talked a little bit about your path to becoming president of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. We've talked about the organization itself. I read the last issue of the society's Black Hawk newsletter and saw this wonderful picture of a house sparrow parked on your hat while you waited in a line for a tour of Stonehenge. We can't not hear that story.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, yeah. So we were at Stonehenge this June on one of the early morning tours, and we're standing in line to get on the bus because it's a short walk to Stonehenge, but they they have a bus to take you there. And uh it's a short walk to Stonehenge from the visitor center to the actual ancient ruins. A woman walks out of the visitor center, and I believe she was a staffer, with something in her hands, and you can tell by the way she's holding them that there's a bird in there. And she opens her hands, and this sparrow sits there and doesn't do anything. Now, I don't know the backstory. I don't know whether it was just tired from flying around or whether there was a bird strike involved, but it had been inside the visitor center and she had caught it, and it just sits on her hands there, and finally she puts her hands, flips her hands up to try and get the bird to fly, and it flies head straight from me and sits on my hat for, I don't know, it was probably a full minute before she gets kind of this exasperated look on her face and walks over and picks it up off my hat and again, you know, flips it up in the air to fly off. And by then it was ready to fly. So I provided a little bit of a respite for that poor sparrow that was obviously had had some kind of a trauma and needed a place to just sit for a little while before it could fly away.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great picture and a great story. Thank you for sharing that. I had to I had to ask. Uh clearly your affection for birds is reciprocated.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, and it's funny because I couldn't see the bird on my hat. So fortunately, uh, you know, my husband and other people took photos of it, but I I just knew it was there. That's great.

SPEAKER_00:

Nancy, it's been such a pleasure talking with you today. I learned a ton about the organization that uh really impresses me. Uh thank you for all the hard work you do on behalf of the birds, the places they need. I wish you and Northern Arizona Audubon Society great success and have really enjoyed working with you on this podcast adventure.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. Same for me.

SPEAKER_00:

We hope you've enjoyed this podcast. Please consider joining Northern Arizona Audubon Society or your local bird group to support the work they do to help birds. And above all, we hope you will continue appreciating and protecting birds and the places they need.

Contributor

Matt Anderson

Host