Needs From: Community Builders of Monterey County

The Monterey Audubon Society is launching an exciting new initiative to protect and raise awareness for Heermann's Gulls nesting right here in Seaside. We want to share our crucial monitoring efforts with the community and highlight why protecting these beautiful seabirds is so important. If you love wildlife and enjoy chatting with the public, this is the perfect project for you!

Public Outreach: Engage with community members and visitors to share information about the Heermann's Gulls and our local conservation efforts.

Fledgling Monitoring: Help keep an eye out for grounded fledglings to ensure their safety during this critical nesting season.

Timeline: Dates are currently TBD, but shifts will roughly run from late June to mid-July.

Minimum 1-hour commitment per week.

You will work in pairs, so this is a great way to meet new people.

Monterey Audubon works with the general community to share our love of birds and nature through our programs and conservation efforts. You don’t have to be a top-tier birder - we need folks from all backgrounds and with various skill sets to help protect the birds and wildlife that so many people love.

We are seeking outgoing people to help us welcome visitors to our programs at tabling events at farmer's markets and street fairs, festivals, and other community events throughout the year. It’s a great way to learn and share with the public what we do and why we care. It is a small time commitment - usually a few hours on a weekend - but a big help.

Black Oystercatchers are excellent indicator species of the rocky shoreline habitat, and desgnated as a species of conservation concern. Black Oystercatchers nest on beaches and are very vulnerable to human encroachment, oil spills, and severe ocean conditions.

Since 2011, Monterey Audubon has been supporting and spearheading the California Central Coast BLOY Monitoring Project (BLOY MP) in the Monterey Bay region and beyond.

Volunteers are invited to join the monitoring team. To be part of the Black Oystercatcher Monitoring Program’s community science program, you are required to do the following:

1. Register as a Monterey Audubon volunteer at http://MontereyAudubon.org/volunteer.

2. Attend the lecture or view a monitoring training

3. Read the accompanying guide.

4. Complete the BLOY Volunteer Project Registration

5. Participate in the field training

Once you have completed all these steps, the Regional Coordinator will provide you with a mentor and assign the monitoring site, where you will check on the birds once per week for at least 30 minutes to document all behavior observed.

A commitment from May through September is required, with allowances for occasional missed monitoring assuming a suitable substitute monitor is available.

Are you a storyteller at heart with a passion for community impact and the environment? We are looking for a creative Volunteer Blogger / Storyteller to help us highlight the incredible people who make our mission possible.

In this role, you will bring our community closer together by sharing the human side of our organization. You will write engaging blog posts and short stories featuring our dedicated volunteers and hard-working staff members. The fun stuff is:

- Conduct Interviews: Reach out to designated volunteers and staff to chat about their experiences, passions, and journeys with Monterey Audubon.

- Field Connections: Occasionally join volunteers in the field or at events to capture the essence of their work and gather firsthand inspiration.

- Craft Compelling Stories: Write 1–2 engaging blog posts or short stories per month (approximately 400–800 words each) that highlight personal impact, local wildlife connection, and community dedication.

Are you a data whisperer, a metadata maven, or a database enthusiast? The Monterey Audubon Society needs your skills! Over the years, we have gathered a wealth of incredible environmental and community data. Now, we face an exciting challenge: we have lots of data, and we need to organize it! If you love turning unstructured information into beautifully organized, accessible digital libraries, we would love to have you join our team.

As a Digital Library volunteer, you can choose to collaborate on a variety of impactful projects, including:

- Photo Archive & Retrieval: Help us categorize, tag, and organize years of stunning wildlife and community photography so our team can easily find and use them

- Newsletter Retrieval System: Catalog and index our historic newsletters to make decades of local conservation history searchable.

- Database Management: Structure and clean up over 10 years of historical project data to help us track long-term environmental trends.

- ArcGIS StoryMaps: Combine geography and data to build visually stunning, interactive stories that show the real-world impact of our conservation work.

-Data-Driven Storytelling: Use our organized data to write compelling summaries and articles about our past and present projects.

Monterey County is full of various habitats that host hundreds of species of birds throughout the year. Given that our field trips fill up in the blink of an eye, the public is itching to be out there, and we need help leading these events! If interested, please contact us. Training and mentoring is provided.