HAWKS ALOFT - Key Persons
Bryan first became interested in nature while growing up on his family farm in Michigan with walks in the woods where he would often see deer, songbirds, and other wildlife. After high school, he enrolled in Michigan Technological University's Forestry Program and graduated with a bachelor's degree in forest management. In the early `90s, after several seasonal jobs with the U.S. Forest Service, he returned to school to study wildlife management and ecology at South Dakota State University. His graduate work entailed studying songbird community dynamics in the Black Hills in South Dakota and Wyoming. He's been a birder ever since. In 1995, he moved to Arizona to work as a wildlife biologist. During a 17-year stint working along the Mogollon Rim, he coordinated yearly Mexican Spotted Owl and Northern Goshawk surveys and conducted riparian songbird surveys. He finished his Forest Service career in 2018 after 6 years as the Southwestern Region's Wildlife Program Leader. In that position, he was fortunate to serve as the region's avian coordinator and a steering committee member of the New Mexico Avian Conservation Partners Committee.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Membership Coordinator & East Mountain Raptor Rescue Coordinator
Evelyn has long looked to Jane Goodall as her hero. While growing up, she watched every wildlife television show she could and collected newspaper articles about the plight of the world's wildlife. Her employment history includes working as an admissions supervisor with California's Great America theme park, a store manager at Crown Books and Lechter's Housewares, a bookkeeper with a printing company, a file clerk with Levi Strauss, and in the last 25 years before retirement, as an eligibility worker with the County of Santa Clara. She began volunteering with Santa Clara County 4-H while working full-time and raising a daughter. She continued to volunteer after retirement with her neighborhood homeowners association, retirement association, local senior center community garden, and with Hawks Aloft. Her current role at Hawks Aloft involves being the membership coordinator, doing educational outreach, mews cleaning, raptor handling, and raptor rescue.
As an artist, writer, and executive director of Hawks Aloft Gail has written three books and published numerous articles in many fields. Back in 1988, she met and fell in love with an educational Red-tailed Hawk. She began working as a volunteer for a local conservation organization, and it wasn't long before she became a staff member. Today, she thoroughly enjoys all aspects of her work, from working in the field and education programs to caring for a large cadre of non-releasable education birds. In her other life, she is a professional quilt maker (Gail Garber Designs) and often travels to teach and lecture on methods that she has developed. Her leisure time is often spent outdoors, searching for birds and more birds, but she and her dogs also enjoy the peace and quiet of their mountain home.
Born in Ohio, Jerry grew up in New Mexico, where he received a B.S. in mathematics from New Mexico State University. During a 20-year Air Force career he also found the time to study meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. The most exciting part of his weather service was as an Aerial Reconnaissance Weather Officer. This included doing the reconnaissance for the Apollo 15 recovery and also participating in seventeen typhoon penetrations in the western Pacific. Later he earned an M.S. in Systems Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Upon returning to New Mexico, he became interested in birds, especially raptors. That led him to a raptor identification seminar led by Gail Garber; his love of raptors began then. He served as one of the founding board members of Hawks Aloft and has been instrumental in raptor surveys along the levee and back roads of the Rio Grande and Estancia valleys that began in 1995 and continue today. Outside of birding, his interests include woodcarving and benchrest shooting.
Joe Acord is a biologist, outdoor enthusiast, and overall nature lover from Maryland. He has spent the last 5 years working as a biological researcher for the University of Maryland where he got a Master's degree in Conservation Biology and Applied Ecology. Joe has also worked closely with Northern Saw-Whet owls and wildlife rehabilitation centers working with raptors. Although he is a newbie to New Mexico, he brings his passion for the outdoors, science, and conservation with him. Joe also enjoys camping and backpacking with his beloved coonhound Caspian.
Job Titles:
- Raptor Rescue Coordinator
Lisa's love for wildlife began when she was a young child. It seemed that every time she went outside to walk around the family farm with her dog, she would find an injured animal in need of care. Soon her mother talked a local veterinarian into coming to their home to guide the treatment of the animals Lisa found. Since then, she has worked in rehabilitating wildlife and training permanently injured birds of prey for educational purposes. Although she has worked with everything from bears to hummingbirds, she learned early on that she had an affinity for raptors. She fell in love with New Mexico in 2006 when she accepted a rehabilitation position with the New Mexico Wildlife Center in Espanola, and has been here ever since. In her free time, you can usually find her playing in the dirt with her flowers, or trying to talk her Moluccan Cockatoo, Luca, off of the roof of their home in Rio Rancho.
Job Titles:
- Education and Outreach Coordinator
Maggie's love for wildlife caught hold very early in life as she was growing up in northeast Georgia. A lifelong equestrian, it was through horses and her time as a working student that she discovered her passion for teaching. She attended Texas State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in geography with emphasis in resource and environmental management. After graduating, she worked a number of educational and environmental conservation positions, including fundraising for Texas Campaign for the Environment and as a lead educator at the Austin's Children's Museum. In 2017, she moved to coastal North Carolina and worked at a residential environmental education program. It was here that she worked with raptors for the first time and fell in love with birds of prey. Since starting at Hawks Aloft, Maggie has taken on a role as a Project Leader for one of the raptor monitoring studies.
Job Titles:
- GIS Specialist and Biologist
Mike grew up in central New Mexico and spent the majority of his childhood outside catching toads, snakes, and lizards. Upon graduation from high school he pursued his love of nature in a formal setting. He graduated from Western New Mexico University in 2003 with a B.S. in Forestry/Wildlife. His summers were spent working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service throughout the Southwest. He attended graduate school at New Mexico State University and eventually transferred to Texas A&M University to immerse himself in their herpetology program. He radio-tracked Dunes Sagebrush Lizards (Sceloporus arenicolus) in southeastern New Mexico and operated trapping grids for a Dunes Sagebrush Lizard mark-recapture study in Chaves County, NM. He has remained active in Dunes Sagebrush Lizard conservation, management, and research since 2004. When he's not in southeastern New Mexico performing lizard surveys, he's at home with his wife and daughter or assisting Hawks Aloft with GIS needs. While he could be classified as a herpetologist, he prefers to think of himself as a naturalist with an affinity for amphibians and reptiles.
Job Titles:
- Secretary of the Board of Directors
Rebecca is a proud New Mexico native, born and raised in Albuquerque's South Valley. When she was in elementary school, the Rio Grande Zoo's (Now called the ABQ BioPark) outreach program came to her class and sparked her interest in Conservation! This led her to attend New Mexico Highlands University where she received a Bachelors of Science degree in Forestry with a concentration in Natural Resource Management. After graduating college, she worked in various positions within the natural sciences' realm. She worked seasonally as a Forest Technician for the United States Forest Service where she learned the importance of forest ecology, wildlife management and preservation. After that she obtained a job with the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Here, she was the first point of contact for visitors at the museum and assisted the education department in curating the Kiwanis Learning garden classes.
Sue has been doing natural-resource work in the Southwest since 1984. She earned a B.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Forestry from Northern Arizona University. After a few years with Arizona Game and Fish Dept., she spent 31 years with the Forest Service, in the Prescott, Cibola, and Santa Fe National Forests. During this time, she was fortunate to work on a wide variety of projects, including native fish surveys, riparian surveys, fire effects monitoring, spotted owl and goshawk surveys, pronghorn habitat improvement, vegetation classification, rare-plant surveys, forest and meadow restoration, and riparian restoration. She has been a wildlife biologist, range conservationist, fisheries technician, ecologist, forester, and silviculturist. She loves working in the varied habitat types of the Southwest, and wants to continue to study, conserve, and protect the natural environment.
Job Titles:
- Treasurer of the Board of Directors
Trevor grew up in northeastern Oregon and received a B.A. in English from Whitman College. Upon realizing that his baseball career was not going to advance beyond college, and that he didn't exactly want to teach English, he decided to pursue an interest in nature. He received an M.S. in Environmental Studies from Southern Oregon University, and it was during that time he discovered an obsession with birds. After completing his M.S., he spent several years working for the Oregon Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit studying Spotted Owls in southwestern Oregon and two years as the project coordinator of a MAPS station for the Medford, Oregon, district of the Bureau of Land Management. He completed his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at New Mexico State University in 2010.