Birdchaser at NAOC in Veracruz

I'm off on Monday to attend the North American Ornithological Conference in Veracruz, Mexico. If anyone else is down there, look me up for birding or bird conservation talk. I'm presenting a paper at 2:30pm on Saturday:

Fergus, R., T. Present, G. Butcher, P. Green, J. Cecil

GRASSROOTS ALL-BIRD CONSERVATION IN HUMAN-DOMINATED LANDSCAPES

While integrated bird conservation can become an agency-driven exercise in top-down planning and management, effective conservation needs public buy-in and participation to produce meaningful results in human-dominated landscapes. By encouraging individuals and communities to target their conservation efforts to species of local, regional, and global conservation concern, National Audubon Society programs promote an integrated all-bird approach at a grassroots level. Our aim is to address the needs of these species across a gradient of urban, suburban, and exurban habitats through conservation actions, and to monitor the impacts of these efforts on the species of concern. We integrate these activities with site-based conservation at Important Bird Areas, and bird monitoring efforts such as Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, and cooperative programs including the Audubon/Cornell Great Backyard Bird Count and eBird. These home- and community-based bird conservation planning, habitat management, and bird monitoring activities are creating a grassroots network of people working to conserve birds in urban, suburban, exurban, and rural working lands in ways that are integrated with regional and global all-bird conservation efforts.