President’s Message – January 2022

These past three months since my last presidential message have seemed relatively uneventful. However, it only seems that way because of few public events. In the final quarter of 2021, we hosted just one identification workshop/field trip, and one public speaker. However, behind the scenes we have been actively developing a three-year strategic plan, modernizing our organizational structure and upgrading our website with a major overhaul, including the establishment of a customer relations management system to facilitate serving our community and positively impacting the planet. We are gearing up to forge ahead full steam, without looking back. As we say goodbye to 2021, and hello to 2022, many of you are working on New Year Resolutions. I am doing the same for CFO. I hope you will join me in making the following resolutions reality in the upcoming year:

1. Let’s reach out to all of Colorado’s field ornithologists – amateurs and professionals alike – and invite them to join us as CFO members. We estimate that less than 20% are current CFO members.

2. Let’s double the number of field observers and donors that participate in the second annual Colorado Birding Challenge on Saturday May 7, 2022.
3. Let’s have the best CFO Convention ever (after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic) May 19-22 in Pueblo!
4. Let’s spend more time observing birds in our local patches and entering the data into eBird so that our observations can have scientific and conservation value and reduce our carbon footprint for the benefit of our planet’s ecosystems. Think globally, act locally!

I’m looking forward to a great year for CFO. Now that most of us are vaccinated, I hope to see more and more of you attending our in-person events and joining our working committees.

Nick Komar
CFO President
president@cobirds.org