By Kim Brand

Have you ever noticed that almost all our Important Bird Areas in North Carolina are at the mountains and the coast? In fact, only 8 of 97 IBAs occur in the developed parts of the Piedmont. Protecting these IBAs is vital to birds' success, but so are many everyday decisions that occur in our cities and towns, from whether downtown building owners turn lights out, to what plants towns choose to plant in parks.

One of our target species, the Wood Thrush, with Spicebush berries - important fuel for fall migration. Photo by Will Stuart.

That's why Audubon North Carolina is excited to announce the new Bird-Friendly Communities partnership program, which focuses effort on where most people live - in cities and towns.

Creating Bird-Friendly Communities is one of five major strategies in Audubon's new strategic plan. In North Carolina, our approach is to bring together people - including chapter leaders, state employees, and people working for other non-profit conservation organizations - who are already working to help birds. By collaborating and sharing expertise in green growth, landscape architecture, native plant work, backyard habitat programs, academic research, communications, environmental education, and development, we can achieve goals that we couldn't accomplish on our own.

Director of Land Bird Conservation Curtis Smalling asked me to co-chair the Bird-Friendly Communities team with him. I had been coordinating a Lights Out program in Winston-Salem, and I was all fired up about the strategic plan from attending the chapter leaders' week at Hog Island Audubon camp in Maine, so I was delighted to help.

The Bird-Friendly Communities implementation team met January 10 at Walnut Creek Environmental Center in Raleigh. Fifteen team members covered a wall with 150 sticky notes bearing handwritten responses to the question, "What would NC look like for birds and people after 10 years of a wildly successful Bird Friendly Communities program?"

Our vision statement arose directly from those ideas:

Bird-friendly communities across North Carolina give birds the opportunity to succeed by providing connected habitat dominated by native plants; minimizing threats posed by the built environment; and engaging people of all ages and backgrounds in stewardship of nature.

We are focusing on target audiences that can make a big difference for birds. For starters, our audiences include:

• City/county planners: We're reviewing local plant lists and advocating for removal of invasive plants and addition of more native plants.
• Landscape architects: We're developing a bird-friendly landscaping continuing education course.
• Architects: We're bringing to North Carolina the bird-friendly building design course developed by American Bird Conservancy.
• Everyone who likes birds: We're working toward a goal of 10,000 Brown-headed Nuthatch nestboxes installed in NC by the end of next year.

...and many more exciting ideas are in development. Stay tuned!

If you'd like to become involved, we would love to have you. Contact Curtis csmalling@audubon.org and Kim kim.b.brand@gmail.com for more information.