Wisconsin Women in Conservation (WiWiC) has announced the return of their Conservation Summer Camp webinar series for a third year starting Thursday, May 18, from noon to 1pm. The 2023 Summer Camp focuses on “Critters of Conservation” and the first webinar is titled Creating a Habitat for Birds: Women Championing Feathered Friends. Registration is free but required for the link at WiWiC.org under Events.
“In our two and a half years of programming, nothing has been more popular than these topical virtual Summer Camp lunch webinars,” said WiWiC Communications Lead Kriss Marion. “We started them as a way to connect with women farmers and landowners during COVID when we couldn’t meet in person, and they’ve turned out to have a huge impact. It’s great to be able to put so many curious landowners and farmers in touch with top women experts in the field of conservation.”
Around 100 people have attended each of the eight past Summer Camp lunch webinars. The topics are chosen through participant surveys and each webinar features conservation professionals who are experts on the topic, and an experienced landowner, farmer or citizen scientist who has put the ideas into practice. Participants also learn about federal programs and local resources to support their conservation goals.
The first webinar, Creating a Habitat for Birds, coincides with world Migratory Bird Week which is May 7-13. The expert speaker will be Cindy Becker of Southern Driftless Grasslands and the citizen scientist is Joy Miller of Driftless Curiosity.
Becker works in Southwest Wisconsin as a conservation liaison connecting landowners with technical and financial assistance available through the Southern Driftless Grasslands partnership. She has been involved in private lands conservation in the region since 2008. Becker has co-authored a primer/handbook for landowners, entitled “Reading the Driftless Landscape” and more recently has been involved in developing a variety of outreach tools on pollinators, grassland birds, and climate smart conservation practices.
Joy Miller is an organic vegetable farmer at Keewaydin Farms and co-founded Driftless Curiosity with her husband Rufus Haucke in 2021. In 2018, she earned her Masters in Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University where she studied environmental ethics, leadership, and food justice. Her research inspired her to create Driftless Curiosity as a social space on the farm where people can deepen their connection with the land, learn about producing food, seek better social solutions, express themselves artistically, and gratify their curiosity about nature.
“I was initially drawn to bird conservation because I love cohabitating with their sweet voices, graceful flight patterns, and vibrant colors. They are the loveliest of neighbors,” says Miller. “However, the more I observed, the more I recognized their crucial role in pest control. While they soar and sing, they’re also eating insects and rodents who nibble our gardens, acting as our aerial allies. When we preserve their habitat, they repay the favor tenfold.”
In 2022, Driftless Curiosity hosted a birding workshop on the farm and spotted a number of meadowlarks, bobolinks, area sensitive hawks, and diverse songbirds. The guest instructor from the DNR was thrilled with the sightings and identified the land as high value habitat. In 2023, Miller is launching the Driftless Curiosity Bird Lovers project, including offering additional learning opportunities for adults and youth, hosting volunteer days to work on developing the “Bird Sanctuary” and improving bird habitat, while still utilizing sections of the farm for agriculture/agroforestry. The Bird Lovers Project emphasizes land stewardship, biodiversity conservation, regenerative agriculture, and permaculture. Miller will be hosting a WiWiC on-farm Field Day on June 23 at Keewaydin Farms.
Registration is open for all of the Conservation Summer Camp webinars now at WiWiC.org on the Events page, and past webinars are archived on the Blog page.
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