Our team

EFTA's people come from all over the world

They bring the skills we need to speak multiple languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin), first-hand understanding of the communities where we work, and a wealth of knowledge about migratory birds and their conservation.

Our Board of Directors

Joni Ellis – Director, Optics for the Tropics

Adam Kent – Avian Research and Conservation Institute

Anne Law – Senior Director & Counsel, American Institute of Architects

Claudia Lewis – Consultant

Kimberly Becerril – Graduate Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Guido Berguido – Director, AdoptaBosque, Panama

Anne Zimmerman – US Forest Service, Retired

World Migratory Bird Day

Our international team visited Cozumel to celebrate World Migratory and acknowledge the first Bird City in Mexico.

The Global Flyways Partnership includes Environment for the Americas, the Convention on Migratory Species, and the African Eurasian Waterbird Agreement. Together, we coordinated the development of the annual conservation theme, which focused on the impacts of light pollution on birds.

Artist Omar Custodio Azabache of Peru developed the art that shared the messages about light pollution and its impacts on migratory birds.

More than 650 partners across the Western Hemisphere hosted World Migratory Bird Day events, activities, cleanups, and education programs that raised awareness of migratory birds and their nighttime journeys. 

Research

Environment for the Americas worked in collaboration with the University of Guadalajara to launch a study of fire as a management tool for the conservation of migratory hummingbirds. This project concluded in 2022.

Field crew worked at the Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve in Jalisco, Mexico to gather data on the self-restoration of flowering plants after fire.

The project engaged numerous community members who learned about the importance of Sierra de Manantlán to migratory and resident hummingbirds.

Western Hummingbird Partnership

EFTA facilitates the Western Hummingbird Partnership by bringing together biologists and educators from Canada, the United States, and Mexico to identify how we can better protect these tiny, but mighty travelers. 

Hummingbirds need flowers to survive, and we're working to make sure they have them along their migration.

Connecting our next generation of conservationists is critical to hummingbird conservation, and we develop education materials and programs to make that happen.

Diversity Internship Programs

We recruited over 150 diverse youth for positions with Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service.

Because of the caliber and quality of our engagement of diverse youth, the Corps Network accredited our internship programs after a rigorous review process. 

Our internship experiences connect underrepresented youth to research, education, interpretation, and history.

Financials

We donated bird conservation education materials to more than 120 locations in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean. A value of more than $15,000.

Through our internship programs, we invested over $100,000 to connect diverse youth to conservation careers.