Instead of our puffiest jackets, hand warmers and wool hats, we traded those in for sun hats, dark glasses and sunscreen with our warmest weather recorded for the annual Evergreen Audubon Nestbox sale in many years…and we’ve been doing this for a long, long time!

Perhaps it was the weather but we topped our numbers from last year, earning over $2600.00 while almost selling out of all nestboxes! We would have had additional inventory but we sold an unexpected number of boxes at the Alternative Gift Fair last November (that’s a good thing!)  

We schedule our Nestbox Build Day only once/year, with over 50 volunteers helping this last September. It’s a great busy day, very energizing and fun, setting us up for selling them throughout the year.

A huge thank you to all our nestbox ambassadors, aka volunteers, who engaged with the community sharing conservation messages on the importance of placing nestboxes in the forests and meadows of our watershed. The need for nestboxes continues to grow dramatically, as we lose areas to new construction and mitigation of forested lands to minimize wildfire risk. And when mature and dead trees are removed, so are the cavities that many of our feathered friends (wrens, chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, bluebirds, and some swallows) depend on for nesting . We like to say “Buy a Bird a Home” and our community did.

Our two teams were led by Ed Furlong at the Evergreen King Soopers and Carol Burdick at the Conifer King Soopers who oversaw inventory and scheduled volunteers.

Along with 6 Evergreen Audubon Board members, we had 22 volunteers man the tables for the 2-day sale. 

Again, we can’t accomplish this sale without a lot of help and we are so grateful for their assistance! Thanks to Jane Locke and Kathy Madison for helping to pack up the nest boxes on the Friday before the sale. And a special thank you to Jane Locke who worked with Ed and Carol over time to update and improve our instruction sheets that accompany each nestbox type.  This was long overdue and we are incredibly grateful!

Below is the list of volunteers and board members, some of which signed up for multiple shifts even over the two days.

Evergreen location:

Ed Furlong, Melissa Leasia, JoAnn Hackos, Linda Engelhart, Beth Cady, Jane Locke, Sue Robbins, Lynn Montgomery, Cathy Wilkins, Dave Owens, Giuliano Hofling, Casey Weiss, Sally Ochsner, Jenny Powell, Pam Hinish, Tony Trumbly, Cris Noller

Conifer location:

Carol Burdick, Chuck Burdick, Kathy Madison, Margo Constable, Debi O’Keefe, Cris Noller, Lin Wareham-Morris, Susan Arntson, Joel Alsup, Bill Andrle, Barbara Jean Gard, Andrea Furlong, Rachel Hutchison, Sue Krause