Volunteer Spotlight: Alex Mann
I grew up in Green Bay, WI and spent most of my childhood outdoors. Behind my house, my brother and I would spend our days exploring the woods and all the wildlife that lived in it. My parents encouraged our curiosity, although my mom did have to regularly enforce her rule of “no critters in the house!” When I was in grade school, my parents gave me a bird field guide – Stokes Field Guide to Birds: Eastern Region. I read that book cover to cover before bed many nights. I quickly became acquainted with all the local House Finches, American Robins, Chipping Sparrows, and my favorite – Cedar Waxwings.
As a stereotypical teenager, I strayed from nature, and all the bird knowledge I gained from that field guide remained dormant for a while. I eventually made my way through college at UW-Milwaukee and started my career as a mechanical engineer. A few years later, a friend was taking an ornithology class and invited my wife Lindy and me to the Horicon Marsh Bird Festival. I bought a pair of binoculars for the occasion and had so much fun that I went back for seconds the next day. Shortly after, I discovered eBird and enjoyed digging through the data on birds I knew very little about. At that point I was hooked. To feed my new obsession, I started looking for local birding events and found a birding group now known as the Milwaukee Birders (milwaukeebirders.org). I learned a lot about birds from this group and learned that birding can be a social event if you want it to be. Forming friendships with people in the birding community opened my eyes to many new opportunities. Around that time, I got my first taste of the Cedarburg Bog via an Owl Prowl led by the famed John O’Donnell and Mary Holleback.
After spending all my spare time birding for a few years, I realized that if I want to continue to enjoy birds in my community, I should help conserve their habitats. I found opportunity in the Friends of the Cedarburg Bog. With FOCB, I’ve helped on workdays to remove invasive vegetation like buckthorn, honeysuckle, and bittersweet. I eventually worked my way into leading bird walks around the bog with John O’Donnell for FOCB and the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin. Most recently I helped a team raise and release Galerucella beetles which function as biological control for invasive Purple Loosestrife.
These days I’m focusing on avian acoustics, expanding my bog knowledge beyond birds (especially invertebrates), filling my yard with native plants, and introducing nature to my toddler Ollie. You may run into me in the field with a big cartoonish parabolic microphone as I try to capture high quality recordings of bird song and unusual calls. Or you might find me crawling around on the ground with a macro lens photographing and trying to identify tiny little critters. I submit my recordings, photos, and other observations to apps that collect these types of data from all over the world (eBird, iNaturalist). I am a big fan of community science and encourage you to give these platforms a try. Many scientific observations are first discovered by “average Joes” like us!
There are endless opportunities to volunteer at the Cedarburg Bog. The more I learn, the more exciting it is to be part of an organization that works to protect nature for future generations.
