John James Audubon was a French-American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. He was notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations, which depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book titled The Birds of America (1827–1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon is also known for identifying 25 new species. He is the eponym of the National Audubon Society, and his name adorns a large number of towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States. Dozens of scientific names first published by Audubon are still in use by the scientific community.
The National Audubon Society is an American non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation of birds and their habitats. Located in the United States and incorporated in 1905, Audubon is one of the oldest of such organizations in the world. There are completely independent Audubon Societies in the United States, which were founded several years earlier such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society and Connecticut Audubon Society.
The cerulean warbler is a small songbird in the family Parulidae. It is a long-distance migrant, breeding in eastern North American hardwood forests. In the non-breeding season, it winters on the eastern slope of the Andes in South America, preferring subtropical forests.
The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with 7.1 million visitors, it was the eighteenth most visited museum in the world and the second most visited natural history museum in the world after the Natural History Museum in London. Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an overall area of 1.5 million square feet (140,000 m2) with 325,000 square feet (30,200 m2) of exhibition and public space and houses over 1,000 employees.
Derrick Zane Jackson is a nature photographer and journalist for The Boston Globe.
Marjorie Harris Carr was an American scientist and environmental activist, well known for her conservation work in Florida. She was born in Boston and grew up in southwest Florida, where her parents taught her about native flora and fauna. After earning a Master of Science degree from the University of Florida in 1942, she went on to establish and lead several conservation efforts in the state, including co-founding the Alachua Audubon Society in 1960 and co-founding Florida Defenders of the Environment in 1969. Her work with Florida Defenders of the Environment — which continued until her death in 1997 — to preserve the Ocklawaha River Valley helped halt construction of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, which is now a public conservation and recreation area named in her honor in 1998. She was inducted in the Florida Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. She was married to herpetologist Archie Carr from 1937 until his death in 1987; they had five children.
Allison Russell is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician and activist.
Nature Forward is an American non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation and education. The organization holds two properties in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area as wildlife sanctuaries, one in Virginia along with its headquarters in Maryland. Until 1959, the organization was known as the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia. In October 2022. the membership voted to change the name of the organization from Audubon Naturalist Society of the Central Atlantic States, choosing the new name Nature Forward.
Dudley Edmondson is an American writer and photographer specializing primarily in outdoors and nature writing and photography. He currently lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His books include What's That Flower?, and The Black & Brown Faces in America's Wild Places, the latter focusing on African Americans in the outdoors, a subject on which he has spoken widely across the United States and for which a fellowship administered by the Greater Seattle YMCA was named for him.
Nia Imara is an American astrophysicist, artist, and activist. Imara's scientific work deals with galactic mass, star formation, and exoplanet detection. Imara was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in the Future Faculty Leaders program at Harvard University. In 2020, Imara joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy.
Joseph Drew Lanham is an American author, poet and wildlife biologist who in 2022 entered the MacArthur Fellows Program for his work "combining conservation science with personal, historical, and cultural narratives of nature." Raised in Edgefield, South Carolina, Lanham studied zoology and ecology at Clemson University, where he earned a PhD in 1997. Lanham received his B.A. and M.S. in zoology, and his Ph.D. in Forest Resources. He also currently holds an endowed chair as an Alumni Distinguished Professor. He was also named an alumni master teacher in 2012. He is currently a professor of wildlife science and teaches several classes and lectures on birding. He describes his work in his own words as: "’Connecting the conservation dots’ is how I envision my research mission. My past work has focused on the impacts of forest management and other human activities on songbirds, herpetofauna, small mammals and butterflies. More recently I've begun to investigate how ethnicity relate to wildlife and other conservation issues. I'm also interested in how birders and hunters might bridge philosophical gaps to effect conservation in a more holistic way."
Corina Newsome is an American ornithologist, birder, science communicator, and graduate student at Georgia Southern University. In response to the racism faced by Black birder Christian Cooper in Central Park, Newsome co-organized Black Birders Week to celebrate Black birders.
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is a Ghanaian-born American activist and writer. She is a co-founder and former CEO of the Sadie Collective, as well as a co-founder and co-organizer of Black Birders Week.
Black Birders Week is a week-long series of online events to highlight Black nature enthusiasts and to increase the visibility of Black birders, who face unique challenges and dangers when engaging in outdoor activities. The event was created as a response to the Central Park birdwatching incident and police brutality against Black Americans. The inaugural event ran from May 31 to June 5, 2020. The week of events was organized by a group of STEM professionals and students known as the BlackAFinSTEM collective.
Earyn McGee is an American herpetologist and science communicator. She is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) IF/THEN Ambassador and a 2020 AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow. In response to the racism faced by Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper in the Central Park birdwatching incident, McGee co-organized Black Birders Week to celebrate Black birders.
Sara Hallager is an American biologist in avian management and husbandry, specializing in the care and conservation of flamingos and kori bustards. She is curator of birds at the Smithsonian National Zoo.
The American Women quarters program is a series of quarters featuring notable women in U.S. history, commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The United States Mint is issuing five designs each year from 2022 to 2025 for 20 total designs. One woman will be honored on the reverse of each coin, selected for "contributions to the United States in a wide spectrum of accomplishments and fields, including but not limited to suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and arts." The obverse depicts George Washington with a new design.
Chelsea Connor is a Dominican herpetologist and birder. Her research concerns the interaction between native and introduced Anolis lizards in the Commonwealth of Dominica. While a student, she co-founded #BlackBirdersWeek. She is an advocate for Black people in the United States being out in nature, and feeling safer when they do so.
Nicole Jackson is an American birder and environmental educator. She co-organized the first Black Birders Week in 2020.
Kassandra Ford co-organized Black Birders Week in 2020. She is an ichthyologist, biomechanist, morphologist, researcher, and birder. She has been honored by the National Science Foundation as a postdoctoral fellow. Ford has also published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Ichthyology & Herpetology, and Integrative Organismal Biology.
