When I began my role as U.S. NABCI Coordinator, one of my new colleagues gleefully asked, “Have you seen the Bird Conservation Napkin?”
Originally created at a happy hour and now infamous within a certain segment of bird conservation professionals, the Napkin was an early attempt to depict the bird conservation community and the many players and relationships within.
As this amazing diagram shows, the bird conservation community is complicated, with multiple interest groups at different scales, focused on different geographies, ecosystems, individual species, or suites of birds. This level of complexity can make it challenging to identify areas of consensus across this community and focus on needs and priorities common to most partners.
The North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) helps the bird conservation community speak with a unified voice. We help identify common needs among other national or international partnerships and communicate about highest priority bird conservation actions and needs to leadership.
However, given the large number and diverse array of bird conservation stakeholders, identifying those areas of consensus is not a trivial task.
To identify common needs and highest priorities, NABCI embarked on a one-and-a-half year process to identify actions that most urgently needed to happen in order to implement NABCI’s vision. We agreed that these Priorities should represent actions for which bird conservation partners could realistically make progress over the next three to five years.
We compiled common themes from national and continental documents, such as the State of the Birds reports, the Partners in Flight Landbird Conservation Plan, the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, the Atlantic Flyway Shorebird Initiative plan, and the Pacific Americas Shorebird Conservation Strategy. From these reports, we extracted dozens of actions and organized these under our themes, creating a comprehensive document that incorporated priorities across bird partnerships.
What our community really needed, however, was a short list: a document that made some difficult choices and could serve as a resource for leadership to inform decisions about allocating limited resources. From this more comprehensive document, the NABCI Committee voted on highest priority actions to identify areas of strong consensus.
We winnowed our list to two actions for each of the five themes, yielding a “Top 10” list of priority bird conservation actions. This short list provides emphasis to consistent, cross-cutting needs within the bird conservation community and helps partners elevate commonalities across bird conservation.
Released in August 2018, the National Bird Conservation Priorities is meant to serve as a framework for the bird conservation community to talk about bird conservation. Our five themes of Land and Water Conservation, Research and Evaluation, Engagement and Partnerships, Addressing Threats, and Policy and Funding should resonate with bird conservation partners as core elements of all-bird, full annual cycle, comprehensive bird conservation.
The Priorities document is a communication tool for the bird conservation community to elevate key actions we all agree on. Our short list emphasizes consistent, cross-cutting needs and will help leadership understand the commonalities across bird conservation.
The release of our Priorities document is just the beginning. NABCI partners are now working to communicate these Priorities to leadership, highlight how local and regional efforts tie into national needs, incorporate these Priorities into strategic plans, and identify collaborative opportunities. We encourage you to consider how you can use this document to support and guide your own organization’s priority work. Together, we can advance bird conservation.
Dr. Judith Scarl is the U.S. Coordinator for the North American Bird Conservation Initiative and the Bird Conservation Program Manager for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. Contact her at jscarl@fishwildlife.org.
Interested in learning more about the bird conservation community and how the different players fit together? The next generation of Bird Conservation Napkin is an infographic that helps to illustrate the structure and connections within the U.S. bird conservation community.