When asked for a list of their favorite bird species, something we request of each Victor Emanuel Conservation Award honoree, Dr. Chuck Sexton and Lisa O’Donnell both placed the Golden-cheeked Warbler at the very top. This beautiful, energetic warbler has grabbed the hearts of many—just look at our logo—but we wanted to know more about Chuck and Lisa’s connection with the species they’ve spent so much of their lives protecting.

The Golden-cheeked Warbler was something of a mid-life discovery for Chuck. Growing up in Southern California, Chuck didn’t see his first Golden-cheeked Warbler until 1975 while on a trip to Pedernales Falls State Park. After that first sighting, Chuck read through Warren Pulich’s 1976 book The Golden-cheeked Warbler: A Bioecological Study. What sealed the deal for him to study Golden-cheeked Warblers in graduate school was seeing What Good is a Warbler, Red and Marjorie Adams’ film, on display at the McKinney Falls visitors center.

Lisa O’Donnell grew up hiking along Barton Creek and photographing Austin’s wooded hills. She always wanted to work with animals, and for a while she thought she’d become a veterinarian. After a friend told her that she could “do more for animals by protecting their habitat,” Lisa pivoted to conservation biology. She began working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991, soon after the listing of the Golden-cheeked Warbler, where she was the lead author on the final rule to list the Barton Springs salamander as endangered and the karst invertebrate recovery plan. She also helped to acquire 1,000 acres for the endangered Houston toad in Bastrop County, and was a member of the Barton Springs salamander, Houston toad, and Golden-cheeked Warbler recovery teams. As a biologist with the City of Austin, Lisa helped to initiate a monitoring program to better understand the Golden-cheek’s habitat use, threats, and long-term viability within the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve. She and her colleagues have published eight papers on their research based on over 15 years of data.

Left: Lisa cradles a Canada Goose in the Semidi Islands of Alaska.

Right: Lisa holds a Black-capped Vireo in her hand.

Black-capped Vireos have played an important part in Lisa’s life, too. They were another endangered bird species under the protection of the Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Plan, and they even featured prominently in Lisa’s wedding decor. She and her husband Jim, who met at the Vireo Preserve (of course!) in the 1980s, even have Black-capped Vireos on their wedding bands.

Left: A Black-capped Vireo couple sits atop Lisa and Jim’s wedding cake.

Right: Jim and Lisa O’Donnell in 1992, the year they got married.

You might be wondering, what was Chuck focused on before the Golden-cheeked Warbler and Black-capped Vireo flew into his orbit? His conservation history goes way, way back; here are some highlights, as described by Chuck himself:

• Undergrad bird census project leads to new nature preserve
  • In the early 1970s, Chuck joined the community effort to protect the area around Upper Newport Bay on the California coast from development. He was an undergrad at UC Irvine at the time. In a demonstration that science matters no matter where you are in your education journey, the findings from Chuck’s one-year census of bird diversity around Upper Newport Bay were used to support the effort to establish an ecological preserve, which you can still visit to this day.

Signage for the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve, which was established back in the 1970s. Chuck’s bird census work as an undergraduate at U.C. Irvine helped provide the scientific foundation to justify the preservation of this bit of his boyhood haunts.

• 5,000-acre addition to the Refuge System from strategic networking
  • If you’ve met Chuck, you know that he’s a friendly guy. It may come as no surprise, then, that he was able to forge a relationship between a navigation district and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to add 5,000 acres of important wetland and brushland habitat to the Lower Rio Grande Valley NWR system. Brownsville Navigation District (BND) was one of Chuck’s clients when he worked in the private sector at Espey-Huston & Associates, and Chuck had the idea to ask BND if they’d lease some of their mudflats east of Brownsville to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife, as these areas were important bird habitat. He got the two organizations talking, and the rest is history.

A 1995 satellite image view (Google Earth) of the important lomas (dark green brushy “islands”) and mudflats east of Brownsville which Chuck helped protect while working in the private sector.

• Protections for cave invertebrates
  • While you don’t often think of caves when you think of birds, protecting Central Texas’ extremely rare cave invertebrates was top of mind for Travis Audubon’s Conservation Committee in the 1980s. In light of development near the Four Points caves, the committee decided to write a petition to have six cave invertebrate species listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Chuck remembers that, at the time, there wasn’t a ton of knowledge on how you petitioned for something to be listed as endangered in the first place. Even so, he took the lead and wrote the petition that Travis Audubon submitted for the listing. A few years later, five of those karst species were listed as endangered.

Want to ask Chuck and Lisa what it’s like to hold a Golden-cheeked Warbler in your hand? Or monitor feisty Black-capped Vireos? You can chat with them about that and more at our Victor Emanuel Conservation Award Celebration on October 3rd.