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Photos courtesy of GCBO staff. June 2008 BASF Bitterns Participate in Big Sit
The BASF Bitterns Bit Sit team comprised of GCBO staff and friends conducted a Big Sit at San Bernard Refuge on April 27 as part of the Birding Classic. The day began at 5:30am when Cecilia Riley and Mike Gray set up camp and began counting species. First bird of the day - Yellow-crowned Night-Heron squawking over the marsh. The other members of the team arrived shortly thereafter and as day broke, we were ticking birds off right and left. The intermittent rain from 9:00am until 1:00pm chased off several members of the team but Cecilia, Mike, and Kelly hung in there and reaped the benefits of a cold front and north winds tallying Blue-winged, Yellow, Blackburnian, and Bay-breasted Warblers. Die-hards Cecilia and Mike ended the day at 8:30pm with a total of 104 species.
GTBC Auction Raises $5155 for Conservation
The GTBC auction concluded on May 2, 2008 and was a great success providing $5155 towards conservation along the coast. The auction items included the original art for this year (shown above), additional original paintings, optics, some really special trips to private ranches, wonderful books, and other nature related items. Click here to review final bids. GTBC Reaches $651,000 for Conservation
The 12th Annual Great
Texas Birding Classic was filled with fun and surprises all the way
through. If you didn't get to share part of it with us this year, we
missed you. The Awards Brunch was held at the recently completed
facility at the Beaumont Botanical Gardens on May 4th where the
Reliant Energy Environmental Partners team (shown here) accepted
their first place award for the weeklong tournament. We had many things to
celebrate including contributing $651,000 to habitat conservation
along the Texas coast through the first 12 Birding Classics' grant
process. Thank you to each of you who participated or played
some part during one or more of the Great Texas Birding Classics.
Your contribution is appreciated and an important reason for the
success. Click
here to
see winning team totals, checklists, and chosen conservation
projects. Ivory-billed Woodpecker Volunteer Day
You are invited to join John Arvin in searching for Ivory-billed
Woodpeckers at the Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge in
southeast Texas. Searches will be conducted on foot and in
kayaks. Training will be provided in GPS and compass use.
Be aware that this is a labor intensive activity in an
environment with bugs and snakes. The next search is June
4, 5, 6. This is dependent
on weather however. Please contact John (jarvin@gcbo.org)
if you would like to participate. Volunteers are limited
to five per day.
On May 17, we manned our GCBO booth at the entrance to the Kemah Bay Day celebration on the Kemah Boardwalk on Galveston Bay. It was a wonderfully cool, cloudy day with a few sprinkles which did not dampen the spirits of thousands of attendees. There were many interesting booths, lots of free goodies, and stage shows throughout the day. Everyone seemed to have a great time! Children raced from booth to booth pursuing clues on the Bay Day Scavenger Hunt, and later in the afternoon, Scavenger Hunt prizes were awarded to the winners. We had a raffle prize of our own - a $30 set of 12 hummingbird notecards by renowned photographer Michael L. Gray - which was awarded to Ciera Salgado of Houston. Congratulations, Ciera!
A Hill Country Retreat
This month members of the GCBO Board of Directors and staff hid away for three days in the lovely and remote Texas Hill Country to develop a five-year strategic path for our avian conservation mission. We began with a discussion of some of the challenges, issues, strengths, and weaknesses in our existing operations, and ended up with a nice set of goals and strategies for accomplishing them. Our major goals include creating a simple but effective marketing plan to increase membership, growing our permanent funds for habitat acquisition and general operations, enhancing the effectiveness of the Site Partner Network, revitalizing our mission-driven education and research programs, and designing a clear path for future growth with the resurrection of the capital campaign to build the GCBO International Headquarters. We also took a fresh look at the organization's mission, vision, and values but only tweaked the wording a bit for clarification. This Five-year Strategic Plan will be available to our members (upon request) by the end of August. Cecilia M. Riley, Executive Director |
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