Birding with ABC at Bill’s Spit, August 2014

If I were trapped in the wilderness with just one other person, I would want it to be Donna La Casse. She knows how to survive, hunting, fishing, dealing with danger, what’s edible, when to run. But just 2-1/2 years ago, I didn’t know her. When her husband died, she knew exactly how to handle her grief, by sharing her expertise and learning more every day. The Batkers introduced her to me at the 2013 CBC count dinner and mentioned she was ready to start birding again, having birded with the Ramseys decades earlier. She took Ken Brown’s Advanced Birding Class until it finished and joined ABC; and she grabbed the Tahoma Audubon scholarship to take the banding training in 2014.

Donna received one of Tahoma Audubon’s banding scholarships in 2014.

When I asked for more volunteers to count swifts, she joined us; she joined Great Old Broads for Wilderness and has been all over the West with them, doing the dirty work to preserve the wilderness; and she’s with COASST when they’re out on the beach counting bird carcasses.

Picking up stinky dead stuff is part of what Donna does.

And of course she’s been with the Washington Nature Conservancy. They have just put their Volunteer Spotlight on our Donna! Lately she’s been working with them to census and try to save the last Pygmy Rabbits in the northwest.

Pygmy Rabbit project, Nature Conservancy. Photo/Hannah Letinich

Read the Conservancy’s article about Donna and congratulate her when you see her, if she’s not out saving the world!
http://www.washingtonnature.org/fieldnotes/2016/7/10/july-volunteer-spotlight-donna-lacasse

Donna carries a weight in her backpack to help her bad back. That weight is her cat, Stoney.