Birdathon 2024 Recap
Thanks to everyone who made the 2024 Birdathon a complete success! With your support, we have surpassed our goal making this year’s Birdathon one of the best Eastside Audubon has ever had!
If you are new to Eastside Audubon or Birdathon, let me give you some context. Every May, many Audubon chapters run a month-long fundraising campaign called Birdathon. This can be a complex campaign as every chapter will do it differently and the campaign may be different year to year even within the same chapter. Our 2024 Birdathon focuses on Team Big Days, Birding Field Trips, Birds and Brews, Global Big Day, and accepting general donations. As you can imagine, this is a crucial part in funding Eastside Audubon in the next year.
As of writing this note, we have raised about $13,900 for Birdathon! This does not include our generous match of up to $15,000 from our friends at the Melody S. Robiduox Foundation! We usually get Birdathon donations for up to a couple of months after the end of May so I fully expect our final number to be even higher. Thank you all for your support of Eastside Audubon!
I want to take minute to report on our Big Day Teams. A Big Day is when a team of birders goes out on a day to count as many bird species as they can and raise money from their supporters to push the team to counting more birds and staying out longer. This year, we had 4 teams.
Team Bird Brains, captained by past Eastside Audubon President Jim Rettig, started their day in Bothell before making their way to Marymoor Park, the Sammamish Plateau and ultimately to central Washington. Their day ended with an impressive 90 species seen! Though impressive, this exact same route in 2011 saw 125 species. The team noted their concern about continued human development, drought, and effects of wildfire that have worsened since their doing this route 13 years ago.
Team Newport Nightingales, captained by Perci Olcer and Betsy Swann, is our team from the Birding Club at Newport High School. Their outing was to the Montlake Fill where they counted 37 species! A highlight for them was seeing a soaring Green Heron clutching a worm in its beak. Both Hattie Cifti and Mckenzie Brown are looking forward to doing this again next year!
Team Karismatic Kestrels, captained by past Eastside Audubon President Andy McCormick, started at Marymoor Park and traveled east on I90, crossing over the Columbia River. They counted exactly 100 birds with the 100th being a Great Horned Owl perched on a telephone pole as they were starting to make their way back home!
Finally, Team Pelican Dive Bar, captained by current Eastside Audubon President Jeremy Lucas (me), stayed on its normal route of going out to the coast of southwest Washington to focus on shore and sea birds. We saw 63 species including, to our surprise, Fork-tailed Storm-petrels in the Westport Marina! To view our trip report, click here.
I would also like to give a huge shoutout to everyone that helped lead events for Birdathon. First, we had 6 field trips led by Chuck Guilford, Kathy Kuyper, Kendall Wiggins, Andy McCormick, Etta Cosey, and Stan Wood. Thank you to each of those leaders who ensured that our participants “got on the birds”! I would also like to thank our Birding Chair Amanda Buse for helping with the organization of some of these walks. Thank you to John Spilker for helping on our Global Big Day organization. Global Big Day (very different from the Team Big Day) is still a new and small part of Birdathon and I appreciate John’s efforts in helping drive it for 2024. Thank you to Amanda Leon, the Executive Director of Eastside Audubon who works tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure everything is smooth on game day. Finally, again, I would like to thank all of YOU for your support of Eastside Audubon and helping us make May 2024 one to remember!
If you are interested in leading any event for Birdathon 2025, or have some interesting ideas, we want to hear from you. Email me at president@eastsideaudubon.org
With gratitude,
Jeremy Lucas
Board President