Jenny Emerson
by Madonna Luers

Jenny Emerson has been on the Spokane Audubon board since January 2019, having joined the chapter when she moved to the Spokane area in 2016. However, she’s participated in chapter summer field trips every year since 2013, when she and her husband were in the area to visit his family and find their retirement home in Deer Park.

“I was a member of the Atlanta Audubon chapter so when we moved, I wanted to join the local chapter here to meet other birders and learn about local birding spots,” she said.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1955, Jenny spent most of her childhood in Ashland, Kentucky. She earned her degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and got her first job in Richland, Washington, at the Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory, working in the area of ultrasonic nondestructive testing to help keep nuclear breeder reactors safe. She got to know more of Washington state then during her free time, backpacking, hiking and cross-country skiing in the Cascade Mountains, including climbing Mt. Saint Helens the year before it erupted.

She met her husband Tom Michaels (now deceased), also an engineer, at Hanford. When she decided to return to school for graduate work, he followed her to Ithaca, New York, where she earned Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University. They started a company together there, designing equipment for automated ultrasonic testing of industrial components, and continued that work in the Boston area. Jenny shifted from industry to academia in 2002 when she returned to her undergraduate alma mater, Georgia Tech, as a faculty member until her retirement in 2016.

“I’ve always loved the outdoors and thought of myself as a nature person,” she said; “but until I started birding, I didn’t appreciate habitats and ecosystems and the bigger picture. Birding teaches you how to observe not only birds, but everything else.”

That birding start came in 1998 when she was on a camping safari in Botswana in southern Africa. “There were two birders on that trip and they pointed out the birds whenever there weren’t other animals to look at,” she recalled. “I was amazed that there were people who would rather look at birds than mammals. It was my first exposure to serious birding, including keeping a list of birds that you see.”

Since then she’s watched for birds (and kept lists) wherever she’s lived. She’s also traveled extensively to see birds, both on dedicated birding trips to Alaska, Kansas, Belize, Panama, Trinidad, Kenya and Ecuador, but mostly as side excursions to family and business trips before she retired, including Australia, China, Taiwan, India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, South Korea, England, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Iceland, as well as numerous destinations in the United States and Canada.

Some of her most memorable birding experiences have been with her nephew, Stratton Hatfield, with whom she’s birded since he was eight years old. He was born and raised in Africa, being the child of missionaries doing human-needs work in sub-Saharan Africa. Jenny was able to visit Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana and Kenya a number of times while visiting family, and, of course, birding was always a focus, at least for her and Stratton. “There was a very short period of time when he was in awe of my birding skills,” she recalled with a laugh. “I told him that one day he’d be much better than I”, and he’d say ‘Oh no, Aunt Jenny!’ Now he’s one of the world’s top birders, working on his Ph.D. at Wageningen University in the Netherlands on Martial Eagle ecology in the Maasai Mara region of Kenya. He’s an eBird reviewer for Kenya and has guided several trips in Africa, including one I took with him to Kenya.”

Both she and Stratton consider their start to birding to be when they stopped for lunch in Botswana in an open-air restaurant where a bright-colored little bird kept hopping around. They were both quite thrilled to identify it as an Acacia Pied Barbet.

But perhaps more memorable was one of her first birding experiences in Massachusetts. She was just back from that Botswana trip, realizing that she knew more about birds there than in her own backyard, when she got her first decent pair of binoculars and a bird book. In the woodlands she quickly saw and heard chickadees, nuthatches and other small birds, but then heard an incredibly beautiful flute-like song from an unseen bird. She remembers trying to chase down the songster in the woods without success. Haunted by the sound, she got a bird song CD, identified it as a Wood Thrush, and finally was able to see it.

“The best part of that was figuring things out on my own,” Jenny said. “My favorite type of birding to this day is forest birding, and I’m currently enamored with observing the Brown Creepers in my Deer Park backyard. But I love all the thrushes, especially when they sing.”

Memorable, too, is the Spokane Audubon trip to Texas in February, 2017, her last birding trip with her late husband Tom, who died in 2018. “Tom never considered himself a real birder,” she said, “but he had a good eye and a good memory. He frequently would come up with the correct ID before I could. And he was always happy to go on birding trips as long as he didn’t have to stand around too much looking at the LBJs (little brown jobs).” Jenny has since remarried, and her husband David Emerson, although not a birder, enjoys wildlife, particularly watching (and feeding) the birds and other wildlife in their yard.

Jenny’s tips for new birders are to get good binoculars, practice using them in your backyard, and go birding by yourself, at least some of the time. “While it’s good to go birding with others, you should also go birding alone. You’ll likely see more birds with others, but you learn the best when you have to figure them out for yourself.”

She says the most obvious important issues for the future of birds and birdwatching are habitat loss and climate change. “But these are caused by too many people who do not know, love, and appreciate the natural world,” she said. “So I really think that the biggest issue is that not enough people are engaged with nature.”

Although Jenny modestly claims that she’s still trying to figure out what she hopes to contribute on the SAS board, her management of the chapter website, Facebook page, e-mail, and query response is indeed helping engage more people with birds and nature.