2024 BBC scholarship winners

The Brookline Bird Club Conservation and Education Committee is pleased to announce our two annual Bill Drummond Young Birder Scholarship recipients, Evelyn Jones of Lunenburg and John Wysocki of Hamilton. These scholarships cover the full cost ($1690) of the Coastal Maine Bird Studies for Teens program at National Audubon’s Hog Island camp on June 16-21, 2024. This year’s field of applicants was the strongest ever, and we thank all applicants for their interest. Evelyn, who started birding through a “penguin obsession,” has been involved for years with the Mass Audubon camp at Wachusett Meadows, where she is now a Counselor in Training. She aspires to go into the field of bird conservation and ecology, and she hopes to learn things at Hog Island that will help her teach a new generation about the “magical world” of birds. John, an active BBC member on field trips, has volunteered for the Lexington Conservation Commission by tracking, monitoring, and using his photos and recordings to document wildlife. He looks forward to learning from knowledgeable teachers and sharing his passion for birding with other teen birders at Hog Island. Congratulations, Evelyn and John!

The BBC continues to carry out the mission of our founders, who believed they had a “sacred obligation” to cultivate young birders and established a BBC Junior Department that offered bike-birding trips, lessons in drawing birds and conducting censuses, and visits to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Maurice Broun, Chandler Robbins, Richard Veit, Peter Alden, and Chris Leahy, among others, were all once young BBC members, “full of wonderment” as one BBC president described them, who went on to become leaders of American ornithology and conservation. We are encouraged by the passion for birding and commitment to conservation we see in our scholarship recipients and other young birders we continue to welcome into the BBC.

Scholarships are supported through the generous donations of club members. To donate, you can designate an amount on the “BBC Young Birder Scholarship” line on the back page of the club bulletin when you renew membership, or donate online by clicking the Donate link on the BBC home page and entering an amount in the box for “Young Birder Scholarship.”