Welcome to the new nycaudubon.org! We are very happy to launch a completely redesigned site, building upon the excellent foundation of our site’s previous iteration, a spectacular volunteer effort led by former Board Member and Advisory Council Member Lynne Hertzog in 2012. Our new site, conceived over the past year in collaboration with the talented firm Reitdesign, sports NYC Audubon’s fresh new color scheme and logo in a modern web platform. Updated and expanded content offers a new perspective on all that NYC Audubon does to protect New York City’s birds and their habitat. New features and content include:
An Adaptable Web Experience
Designed with mobile-first usage in mind, our new website features a responsive design, adapting pages to display well no matter what device you are using, whether a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.
A Redesigned, Streamlined Homepage
We have redesigned our homepage to offer visitors more timely information about our latest activities and a clearer snapshot of our organization’s mission. Our homepage now features a scrollable feed of our latest Instagram posts, which is often the first place we announce events as well as reports on happenings within the organization. Our new “Top Stories” section allows you to quickly find timely Urban Audubon articles made available digitally, our latest blog posts, and pressing advocacy actions you can take to protect birds.
For our inaugural lead homepage image, we chose a striking photo of female Bobolinks by Lloyd Spitalnik. Bobolinks are in decline due to grassland habitat loss, and have been uncommon in New York City in recent years. But thanks to innovative, newly created urban habitat, the species is on the rise here, recently nesting in Staten Island’s Freshkills Park and sighted in Brooklyn’s Shirley Chisholm State Park. The Bobolink reminds us why our work conserving the City’s natural areas and habitats remains so vital.
Updated, Expanded Birding Resources Section
Our new Birding Resources section includes a new Birding 101 page for new birders, as well as new Birding in NYC pages that profile over 100 NYC birding hotspots all across The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. To help you find all these wonderful parks and natural areas, the top of each borough page features interactive Hotspots Maps with links to birding information and Google Maps directions.
We are grateful to the many birders across the City that have contributed their expertise to our park descriptions. We also know that many of you may have more information to share about the hotspots you know well—and we'd love to hear from you! If you have corrections, suggestions, or additional details that you feel would be helpful to visitors to any park, please write to Tod Winston at twinston@nycaudubon.org.
The contributors so far are acknowledged at the bottom of each park page; in particular, we'd like to thank Annie Barry, Loyan Beausoleil, Shane Blodgett, César A. Castillo, Howie Fischer, Karen Fung, José R. Ramírez-Garofalo, Doug Gochfeld, Cliff Hagen, Mary Beth Kooper, Heydi Lopes, Jean Loscalzo, Joseph McManus, Robert Paxton, Sarah Plimpton, Don Riepe, Jack Rothman, Ben Sadock, Donna Schulman, Georgia Silvera Seamans, Paula and Michael Waldron, Steve Walter, and Terence Zahner.
Since dedicated Advocacy and Outreach Manager Molly Adams joined us several years ago, we have asked ourselves what we can do to better mobilize our members to speak up for and take actions on behalf of our city’s birds. To enable more engagement, we have added a dedicated Avian Advocates page featuring timely, important actions you can take to help birds in our city and across the country. A new Make NYC Bird-Friendly section features simple actions you can take in your home and community to make our city safer for migratory birds, whether it is making your windows bird-safe, sharing the shore with migratory shorebirds, or keeping your cats indoors.
New, Dynamic Photography
Our new website would not be possible without the work generously donated by dozens of excellent photographers in our community and beyond. In particular we'd like to thank local photographers Gigi Altarejos, Debbie Becker, Bill Benish, César A. Castillo, Larry Closs, Eddie Crimmins, Corey Finger, Richard Fried, Karen Fung, Doug Gochfeld, Isaac Grant, Steve Guttman, Gail Karlsson, Avi Lewis, Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Laura Meyers, Keith Michael, Steve Nanz, Dave Ostapiuk, Anders Peltomaa, Will Pollard, François Portmann, Lawrence Pugliares, Carla Rhodes, Don Riepe, Jack Rothman, Jean Shum, David Speiser, Lloyd Spitalnik, Paula Waldron and Bruce Yoltone, for their multiple contributions. Many others have contributed, as well; please scroll over (on desktop) or tap (on mobile) a photo to read the photographer credit and visit their photo site, if available. (Note that as of this writing our developer is still working out a few kinks with the photo captions.)
Backend Improvements
We’ve improved the experience for members, donors, and program participants thanks to better integration with our new donation, membership, and events platform. We have also enhanced HTTPS security beyond our donation, membership, and event forms and across our entire site in order to protect our users’ data on every page.
And Finally, A Rebuilt dBird.org Expanded for Use across the country
In addition to a completely redesigned nycaudubon.org, our online crowd-sourced bird mortality and injury data collection tool dBird has been rebuilt in partnership with Seattle Audubon and has moved to a new home at https://dbird.org. The online tool has been greatly expanded to allow Audubon chapters and other organizations across North America to use it to report and manage bird-mortality data within their own regions. Organizations interested in using dBird can fill out this form to get signed up! We are so excited to share this tool with other conservation organizations and see our work have a nationwide impact. Look forward to more information about the expanded dBird in an upcoming blog post.
Let Us Know What You Think and Help Us Track Bugs
As we continue to refine website page appearance, content, and performance after launch, we want to hear from you about any issues/bugs you find! Please use this form to send us any feedback you have about the new site or report any bugs you find as you are looking through our new pages.
