Green Mountain Bird Alliance Adds Two New Board Members
By Lucie Lehmann
The Green Mountain Bird Alliance (formerly the Green Mountain Audubon Society) welcomed two new board members at its January meeting.
Four Winds co-founder, longtime educator, author, and naturalist Deb Parrella brings decades of outdoor education and natural history instruction to her new role, which she is embracing with characteristic enthusiasm. “I’d like to help with things that involve outreach,” she begins. “That’s where I see I can help the organization,” adding, “I’m willing to do any educational things that involve kids. I like the idea of families learning about nature, and I want to help with events where you see that happening.”
A longtime Huntington resident, Deb is intimately familiar with the Green Mountain Audubon Center and its trails and camps. Her kids went to camp there, and she walks the property regularly, which makes her the natural fit for the vacant Stewardship board position. As its liaison to the property, she’ll interact with staff there to assure that the Green Mountain Bird Alliance, which owns but does not run the property, is kept informed of infrastructure and other physical and financial needs at the center so that it can support them appropriately.
Deb took her first ornithology class in college, where one of her fellow students was board president Pat Phillips, but she says she’s always been interested in birding. She jokes that she “spent the pandemic at Delta Park,” looking at birds, embracing tools like Merlin and eBird, and buying her first spotting scope, which changed forever how she thought about shore birds. “It’s an amazing group of birds!” she marvels, laughing, reflecting on how, bit by bit, she has become not just a keen birder, but a better one. She’s eager to put those skills to use as a board member.
David Hewitt of South Burlington, 28, grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, near the Long Island Sound and close to the Audubon Connecticut Fairfield Nature Center trails. The two environments—abetted by a sailing and birding-obsessed father—instilled in him deep, intertwined passions for conservation and birds, especially raptors. “We actually had a lot of Bald Eagles by the Sound where I grew up…they piqued my interest,” he explains. He shares, however, that his favorite bird might just be the Blue Jay for the shock of discovering as a boy that its feathers didn’t contain a blue pigment but were the result of structural coloration.
David is a gifted writer whose work during his two-year AmeriCorps stint at Audubon Vermont was regularly featured in Audubon publications. He will join the Communications Committee of the board with an eye towards writing features for the newsletter.
Like Deb, David is interested in outreach, particularly expanding the appeal of his twin loves to a new generation. “I’d like to do my best to bring nature to the younger generation and show them that it’s interesting and worthwhile,” he says, lamenting the lack of knowledge and resignation that most young people exhibit about critical conservation issues and vowing to show them that it’s not too late to have an impact. As one of the board’s youngest members, David is uniquely qualified to do just that.
Photo by iNaturalist user er-birds, licensed under CC-BY.