Thank You and Happy Onward Birding to Ali Wagner
By Lucie Lehmann
Ali recording her 1000th life bird in Colombia.
To know recently retired, distinguished, and dedicated GMAS board member Ali Wagner is, first of all, to marvel at her extraordinary birding skills, including a preternatural auditory recall of the songs and chip notes of hundreds of Vermont’s resident and migratory species. Equally inspiring, she has never lost the joy and wonder that birding gifts us. As Scott Sainsbury, a longtime friend and fellow board member observes, “She is so endlessly enamored with the beauty and behaviors of our winged distant cousins that she believes without doubt that anyone who stops to look will be similarly enchanted.” And, he adds, “Partly it’s because she thinks they should be enchanted – that the world would be a better place if everyone was a birder. I can’t disagree with that.”
For this relative newcomer to Vermont and its breeding warblers, it was Ali’s passion for teaching that first distinguished her from the many other fine birders that I met when I moved here four years ago. One memorable day in Camel’s Hump State Forest, she not only taught me to recognize the Mourning Warbler’s song with a clever mnemonic, she found the hooded life bird for me, every bit as excited as I was to see its cinereous head, black throat, and olive-green body. Imparting her knowledge to others, especially young birders, is at the core of Ali’s love of birding, the song line of her life. Her skills and dedication to the board and the birding community will all be sorely missed.
“Ali’s heart for others extends to the many children she has taught and cared for,” says Sainsbury. “Helping them learn to set boundaries and focus on what will benefit them most. And, of course, encouraging them to see, understand, and appreciate more of the world around them.”
Ali concurs, saying that her greatest joy as a birder is “when I take kids out and they’re looking in the scope and you can tell they haven’t gotten on the bird, and then their whole face changes when they see it.” Her voice lilts as she describes that moment. “And their malapropisms,” she chuckles. “I used to take second graders out and this kid took out a field guide and he came up to me and said, ‘Miss Wagner, look at these Cheddar Wax Wings.’” Ali emits her distinctive throaty laugh as she recounts it. A moment later she grows reflective describing a young man crying and saying he had no idea a bird could be so beautiful after she showed him a Western Tanager in her scope. That’s what continues to motivate her, she says, “that small gesture of sharing that opens the world to them.”
Ali and Juan David in Colombia in 2024.
A longtime career first in early and then special education came about, she says, because she has always enjoyed little children, observing and sharing her knowledge with them, even being silly with them. “It’s important to be goofy,” she asserts seriously. I witnessed all of that firsthand in Colombia in 2024, when Ali and I were part of a birding group led by Chip Darmstadt, president of FlyAway Birding. One morning we visited a coastal indigenous village where we met, among others, a small, smart, and wildly curious boy named Juan David. It was Ali to whom he immediately gravitated, attaching himself to her like an oyster spat on a reef. And it was Ali who immediately showed him how to use her binoculars, who first welcomed him into our group, who gifted him a Mad Birders hat from Vermont, and who had tears in her eyes when our van pulled away, leaving the budding ornithologist waving at us until he disappeared from view. The moment was quintessential Ali.
She didn’t grow up as a birder, though she describes her parents as “closet birders” whose enthusiasm likely planted a latent seed in her. In fact it was with her mother in 1988 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, that her spark bird, “a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, landed on my hand,” igniting a fiery curiosity that she has never sought to douse.
Ali credits several mentors with helping her to become the expert and generous birder that she is, among them Shirley Johnson, Eric Hines, Pat Folsom, Fred Pratt, and the late Marty Ilick. She paid their mentorship forward for decades as a GMAS board member who led countless outings for children and adults; in monitoring walks at both the Birds of Vermont and Audubon Vermont properties; at Huntington Elementary School, where she currently teaches a new generation of young birders; through Grasshopper Sparrow and Bald Eagle monitoring; and as an area leader on the annual Burlington Winter Bird Count.
Her retirement as a board member coincides with a gradual retirement from working, as well, though she doesn’t plan to stop doing much of what she has always done, especially introducing kids to the joys and responsibilities of birding. “I want to make a difference in one person’s life,” she says.
To that I say, thank you, Ali. You’ve already made a difference in so many lives, mine among them.