Travis Audubon is excited to announce that Lisa Ramie will joining us as our new Development Manager. Lisa has loved animals for as long as she can remember. As a child, she ran a snail hospital in her backyard, using bandages to patch snails’ broken shells. More recently, she has cared for bats and songbirds in wildlife rehabilitation centers in Texas and California. Lisa has over 1,500 hours of bat handling experience from her work at Austin Bat Refuge, where she became well-acquainted with 10 species of insectivorous bats and the ins and outs of nonprofit leadership and development. By the time Lisa left her role as Austin Bat Refuge’s Board President, she had implemented a donor database, led 10 fundraising campaigns, and even shown over a million TikTok users how cute evening bats are. She is thrilled to bring this experience to Travis Audubon.

Before working in wildlife conservation, Lisa led a copyediting team at a software company and offered technical support at a nonprofit and at a university. One of her most interesting work experiences was cleaning artifacts in an archaeology lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she graduated with degrees in Anthropology and Biology. She misses the plovers, pelicans, and other seabirds of Santa Cruz, but Austin’s cardinals, killdeer, parakeets, and screech owls more than make up for it.

As of late, Lisa has been listening to The Bird Way while knitting a sweater. She also just finished painting a portrait of one of her dogs, Lovebug, a chihuahua-poodle-pomeranian mix that looks nothing like any of those breeds and is obsessed with chasing after his flirt pole (worth a google). Don’t feel bad for Lisa’s other dog, Squirt, though—he already has a portrait and lives a full chihuahua-poodle life of zoomies, treat puzzles, and sitting pretty. You can reach Lisa, and hear all about her dogs, at lisa@travisaudubon.org.