Nomination Period for 2006 Maine Audubon Annual Awards Now Open

The Maine Audubon Annual Awards draw attention to individuals in Maine whose outstanding efforts as volunteers or professionals have advanced Maine Audubon’s mission of wildlife conservation.

Download nomination form.

• Maine Audubon members may nominate an individual for an award during the nomination period of March 15-Friday, May 12.

• Awardees do not have to be members of Maine Audubon.

• Award nominations will be reviewed by Maine Audubon staff and board members who will notify award winners by June 1.

• Awards will be presented at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, June 29, at Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Falmouth as part of Maine Audubon’s Annual Meeting and Peony Bloom and Ice Cream Social.

• Press releases to publicize awardees’ work for wildlife conservation will be distributed to Maine media.

Meet our 2005 awardees:

Scarborough resident Julie Suchecki is the 2005 Maine Audubon Volunteer of the Year, Maine Audubon’s annual award to a volunteer who has substantially assisted Maine Audubon programs, projects or events.

In her 10 years as a board member of the York County Chapter of Maine Audubon, Suchecki has served as secretary, established a Web site, recruited members, introduced new people to birding, revamped and edited the newsletter, and created and managed Maine’s largest and most active birding list-serve.

As a volunteer at Scarborough Marsh Audubon Center, Julie designed and painted exhibits, worked on projects and fund raisers, and designed trail and canoe guide brochures in French as well as English.

Julie is best known for establishing and managing the York chapter’s Birding Tree, which began as a phone tree to alert local birders of rare or unusual sightings and has grown to a list-serve with several hundred subscribers in Maine and beyond.

Standish resident Dave Evers is the 2005 Maine Audubon Conservationist of the Year, Maine Audubon’s annual award to an individual or group who as made a significant contribution to wildlife conservation in Maine.

Over the past decade, Evers and his colleagues at Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham have captured and banded more than 3,000 common loons across the United States and Canada, providing answers to many long-standing questions about loon conservation and biology.

Evers also has worked diligently to document the detrimental effects of mercury on common loons and other wildlife. The Maine Legislature used his research results to reduce mercury emissions in Maine and to eliminate from the waste stream certain products containing mercury. More recently, Evers documented nine mercury hot spots in northeastern North America, four of them in Maine.

He summarized the significance of those hot spots in the publication Mercury Connections, which he shared with key members of Congress this year. His presentations on Capitol Hill on the effects of mercury helped kill key proposals aimed at loosening restrictions on mercury emissions. Evers’ research and findings on mercury will be central to a pending lawsuit by the Attorneys General in the Northeast against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition to helping support legislation in both Vermont and New Hampshire that reduces mercury at the state level, the information in Mercury Connections is helping Representative Tom Allen craft a bill to set up a mercury monitoring program for the northeast.

South China resident Lisa Kane is the 2005 Maine Audubon Educator of the Year, Maine Audubon’s annual award to an educator whose environmental education methods in and beyond the classroom serve as a model and inspiration for others.

A natural-resource educator with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, Kane turned a former pheasant farm and drop-off site for injured animals that was about to be decommissioned into the Maine Wildlife Park in Gray, featuring live wildlife, interactive nature exhibits and a full roster of programs that give
more than 100,000 people a year up-close views of Maine’s wildlife.

In addition to coordinating the park’s programs for more than 3,000 students per year, Kane presents environmental education programs at Swan Island Wildlife Management Area and is a lead instructor in the DIFW program Becoming an Outdoors Woman. She also is state coordinator for the Project WILD nature education programs and a frequent and popular presenter at conferences as well as a willing collaborator with a variety of organizations.

MAINE AUDUBON works to conserve Maine’s wildlife and wildlife habitat by engaging people of all ages in education, conservation and action.

Support for Maine Audubon comes from its 11,000 members and supporters, including individuals, foundations and corporations. Members are automatically members of their local Maine Audubon chapter and National Audubon Society, Inc., of which Maine Audubon is an affiliate. Contributions to Maine Audubon are used only in Maine.

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