This year Audubon Rockies is planning a region-wide birding fund raiser to support the Community Naturalist program which includes our own Zach Hutchinson. This event will be held during the week of May 8-15 with teams all the way from Devils Tower south to Pagosa Springs. I am hoping to enlist more birding teams in Wyoming to join with Audubon Rockies staff, board and other volunteers to solicit pledges from friends, neighbors, relatives, and anyone who owes you a favor, to support this event and help expand the Community Naturalist program into more schools and more outdoor activities for kids and adults.

The way this works is that if you are willing to help, you put together a small team to contact prospective donors to make a pledge to Audubon Rockies of an amount per-species that your team identifies on any 24-hour period during that second week of May; anything from $.10 to $10 per bird that you and your team identify that day, either by sight or sound. Or your donors can make a direct gift to Audubon Rockies, but that takes some of the fun out of it. The real goal here is not how many species you see but rather how many sponsors you can get.  Audubon Rockies can supply you with a sample solicitation letter, pledge form, a spread-sheet form for tracking pledges, gifts and payments. The Fort Collins regional office will keep track of donations as they come in, send acknowledgements and tax receipts to your donors, and keep you informed of donations that go straight to the office so that you can personally thank them. And I will be available with advice from past experience doing this.

So, I encourage you to get involved by letting me know if you are interested by contacting me at: bdrea@tribcsp.com.   I am hoping that region wide, we can raise enough to fund one Community Naturalist staff position.

Bart Rea