Peggy Lauber’s passion for the outdoors and curiosity about nature has earned her a multiple-term presidency for North Fork Audubon Society (65275 County Route 48, Greenport, 631-477-6456, northforkaudubon.org).
About 15 years ago, Lauber attended her first Audubon meeting. Since then, she’s become a leading force, coordinating bird walks and talks, semiannual newsletters, native plant sales and trail maintenance at Inlet Pond County Park, home of the organization’s Roy Latham Nature Center.
As part of our story about the natural North Fork on p. 86, Lauber talked to us about the Audubon Society’s impact and her expectations for our local ecosystem.
What is the mission of North Fork Audubon Society?
Our mission is very simple—it’s to connect people with nature.
What does North Fork Audubon Society’s work look like in practice on the North Fork?
What we’ve come to focus on is how to help people appreciate and promote birds and nature in their own backyard, by planting native plants. At North Fork Audubon, it’s very important to us that our gardens that we have, and we continue to work on, should demonstrate how easy it is to grow native plants that benefit birds.
Outreach to the community, outreach to schools and children, is very important to us. Doing regular bird walks, just taking people out with bird guides and helping them to see what’s all around.
What are the Audubon’s most pressing missions and challenges?
You start with the fact that we’ve lost three billion birds since 1970. That’s one out of every four birds. That’s an astonishing number. So it’s important to us to help protect birds.
The most pressing mission is to work on preserving not only our local habitat but to address the issue of: how can we help our birds that migrate through here in the spring and nest here? Those birds that spend the winters down as far south as Central and South America, how do we help protect the places that they depend on in the winter to survive so that they can come back here the following year? We’ve really become focused on how we can have a more global take on this issue and educate people about that.
As president, what impact do you hope your leadership will have on the North Fork environment’s long-term health?
I hope to help educate our children to become aware of the problems and the solutions—the problems that we have with how to help our birds to survive and the solutions, which are to develop partnerships within our own communities and in places where the birds go.
What are your favorite signals of spring in the natural world on the North Fork?
When I wake up one morning in early May and I hear the beautiful song of the Baltimore Oriole in our neighborhood.
