The Auduboner

Movers & Shakers

The Compleat Teacher

Photograph by Katherine Lambert

William R. Stott Jr., a former president of Wisconsin's Ripon College (he also taught ornithology and literature), has created a spectacularly successful environmental-education program for the Fairfax Audubon Society in Virginia. Audubon spoke with him about the idea of adapting this kind of rigorous curriculum for other chapters.

Question: So you integrated birding into your academic career?
Answer: Birds have fascinated me since I was six years old. While dean of students at Georgetown University at the end of the 1970s, I became Fairfax Audubon's second president. After I left Ripon in 1995, the chapter asked me to develop a natural history curriculum.

Q: Tell us about the program you organized out of that.
A: We call it LEAPP, for learn, enjoy, appreciate, preserve, protect. It's made up of college-level courses. Birds take the lead but as an integrated part of the natural world. There are courses in botany, eastern forests, piedmont ecology, and so forth, and workshops that include raptors, shorebirds, reptiles and amphibians, butterflies, and wetlands.

Q: Do you teach most of them?
A: Goodness, no. But I teach some, to prime the pump, so to speak. We have terrific teachers in the area—faculty members, government biologists, etc. People ranging from 25 to 75 sign up. An optional course of study that includes 150 hours of classroom work as well as fieldwork leads to a Master Naturalist Certificate.

Q: How has LEAPP helped the Fairfax chapter?
A: The most important responsibility an environmental organization has is education. We've reached thousands of people.When you integrate a curriculum into your mission, you get not only a way to think about what you want to do but also a way to express those goals. Audubon has a
great advantage: A chapter is the most effective vehicle for presenting an education program. You create citizen environmental scientists, who in turn are equipped to carry out your chapter's mission.

Q: Your area has abundant resources—wealthy people, capable instructors. Can other chapters put together a program like yours?
A: We're eager to share our ideas with others. Remember, you don't have to create a program all at once. But as your chapter produces knowledgeable members, they are ready to speak to potential donors articulately and passionately about your mission. And that's vital, notably for fund-raising and also for the recruitment of other members.

—Frank Graham Jr.

Fairfax Audubon is in Annandale, Virginia (703-256-6895; www.fairfaxaudubon.org).

Chapter Spotlight

A Regal Haven

Craig Andresen and St. Paul Audubon have worked to save bluebirds, native plants, and now butterflies.

Photograph by Thomas Strand

The regal fritillary butterfly is as elegant and lovely as its name. Since it's also big—almost as large as the familiar monarch—an inexperienced observer might confuse the two species. Both have black and burnt-orange wings with white spots. But while the monarch is widespread, the regal is a rarity. It has lost much of its tallgrass prairie habitat—along with the prairie flowers it relies on for its sustenance—to agriculture and development.

So five years ago, when two regal fritillaries were spotted fluttering across a federal military arsenal in the Minnesota suburbs, butterfly lovers were delighted. It was the first definitive sighting of the species in the Twin Cities area in several decades, and it occurred during the St. Paul Audubon Society's annual butterfly census at the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant.

For the past 13 years the Audubon chapter has sought to preserve, enhance, and restore prairie and other natural resources at the arsenal. The effort has been led by Craig Andresen, 54, a native Minnesotan and the former owner of a chain of pet stores. Andresen started in 1991 by erecting 400 nesting boxes in the military installation. As a result, within a few years 300 baby bluebirds were fledging at the site annually.

Covering almost four square miles, the arsenal is dotted with buildings, roads, railroad tracks, and parking lots. What attracts conservationists is the rest of the tract, which includes remnant parcels of native prairie, scattered woodlands, a large marsh and smaller wetlands, a lake, and an undeveloped creek corridor. The place is rich in wildlife, particularly butterflies: 57 species, including the regal fritillary, have been sighted there during annual counts.

After his bluebird project, Andresen directed prairie burns and exotic-plant eradication at the arsenal. "We've saved this island of habitat in the middle of the Twin Cities," he says proudly.

Andresen's work receives high marks from Robert Dana, a prairie ecologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which approved the restoration projects. "Military facilities and bases have inadvertently turned out to be significant sites of biological diversity," Dana says. "To have such a large, undeveloped area as the arsenal in the middle of the Twin Cities is an extraordinary thing. I'm really grateful to people like Craig for raising public consciousness about the arsenal's biological diversity and its natural resources significance."

—Dean Rebuffoni

Important Bird Areas

Battery Island

One of nature’s great spectacles is a colony of white ibises in flight as evening comes on. With the setting sun flashing on their black-tipped white wings and the scarlet of their scimitar bills, they approach in wave after wave to dip and settle at their nests.

The recent designation of Battery Island as an Important Bird Area (IBA) as well as an IBA of Global Importance, reflects its status as the site of North Carolina’s largest colony of wading birds. Besides 500 pairs of herons and egrets, more than 9,000 pairs of white ibises, between 5 percent and 10 percent of their North American population, nest here in the spring and summer.

Lying offshore at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, the 100-acre island became a National Audubon Society sanctuary in 1982. White ibises find ideal nesting places in the island’s sturdy clumps of salt-tolerant, storm-resistant yaupons and red cedars.

The river’s strong currents prevent raccoons and other predatory mammals from reaching the colony, while an Audubon warden (paid for by the Cape Fear Garden Club) enforces a year-round ban on human visitors. Nearby swamp forests provide abundant crayfish for young ibises, which are intolerant of crabs and other salty marine prey favored by adults. (For more information about Audubon’s Important Bird Area program, visit www.audubon.org, go to Birds & Science/Bird Conservation, and pull down to Important Bird Areas.)

-Frank Graham Jr.