Sunday marked Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy’s 17th Annual Meeting and it was once again a full house. After enjoying good food and catching up with each other and bidding on some amazing silent auction items, we launched into the business part of the meeting.
Linda Sieh, our Treasurer gave the latest Treasurer’s report and Joe Coleman gave a brief talk on the State of the Organization, and indeed it was another great year! We continued to grow our membership and offer more programs and field trips to people across the county and beyond. Citizen Science volunteers continued to grow as well with more people than ever getting out into the field to monitor birds, butterflies, amphibians and streams.
As you know, volunteers are what make Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy so effective and this year we recognized Donna Quinn as our Volunteer of the Year. Donna has served on the Board for several years, coordinates the publication of our Habitat Herald, has acted as team captain for the Raven Loonatics for the birdathon, ran our Nature Book Club, represents us at local fairs and has helped secure some great speakers for our programs. Donna has done a phenomenal job and our thanks goes out to her!
Also at the meeting, we recognized students across the county who are investigating and startingto study our natural world. Paul Miller presented Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy’s Science Fair Awards to three students whose project really stood out at this year’s Science Fair. Those award winners were: Ehsan Jafree (Stone Bridge HS), Lauren Salman (Stone Bridge HS), Samuel Kane (Academy of Science, Dominion High School) [more details to follow in another posting]
We also recognized six young naturalists with the Roger Tory Peterson Young Naturalist Awards: Cristina Peraza (Ashburn Elementary School), Jonathan Mulyar (Waterford Elementary School), Elry Navarro (Heritage High School), Dominque Lategano (Loudoun County High School), Ellen Wiener (Loudoun Valley High School), and Eryn Massey (Tuscarora High School)
Joe Coleman then turned the floor over to Mike Bowen of the American Birding Conservancy. Joe had been nominated for the prestigious Chandler Robbins Award for Education/Conservation and was selected as this year’s recipient from a slate of nominees that came in from across the country.
Concluding the awards segment of the meeting, Ann Garvey reported out on the success of this spring’s native plant sale and presented Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy with a check for over $900 from the two native plant nurseries that donated a portion of their sales to LWC.
Wrapping up the business part of the meeting was the election of Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy’s officers. The new slate of Officers was presented to the membership and voted upon.
Our new officers are:
President: Nicole Hamilton
Vice President: Janet Locklear
Treasurer: Linda Sieh
Secretary: Lynn Webster
Following the election, we turned the meeting over to George Fenwick, President of the American Birding Conservancy who engaged us all with great stories of birds and bird conservation efforts going on here in the US and across South America. Now we all have ideas of great travel adventures to take in support of birding conservation!
Many thanks to all our members for being a part of Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy, volunteering when you can, and joining us at events, and helping promote the preservation and proliferation of healthy wildlife habitat throughout the county!
More photos from the event can be seen here on our Facebook Page.