Projects & Outreach
Outreach
B4B—Backpacks for Birders
Want to go birding around Windsor but don’t have the right stuff?
In 2022, PIBO launched its Backpacks for Birders (B4B) program. With funding from TD Friends of the Environment and the Windsor Essex Community Foundation, we put together 22 backpacks filled with everything a budding birder needs for a day’s outing—a pair of Vortex or Bushnell binoculars, a binoculars harness from Pelee Wings, a Sibley Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, Zeiss lens-cleaning spray and a lens-cleaning pen, a bird checklist for the Windsor area, and a list of local birding hotspots. In 2024, we added 20 new backpacks for distribution, with additional language resources.
Backpacks, available in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, are available for borrowing from the Windsor Public Library. Some packs have been donated to the Pelee Island Public School, Caldwell First Nation, and the John McGivney Centre school for use in those communities. The school packs also include a bird feeder and two-year subscription to Cornell University’s Project Feeder Watch.
BIPOC for Birds
In 2022, with grants from the Windsor Essex Community Foundation and Nature Canada, PIBO hired two members of Windsor’s black, indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) communities to develop five events to take place between January and May, aimed at introducing their families, friends, and communities to nature and birds.
That year, Davina Sanjgqly and Lakshimi Thagruval came up with fabulous ideas for events to introduce young people and their families to the pleasures of birding. Events such as a Jeopardy-like bird quiz, bird-house-building afternoons at Ford Test-track Park in Windsor, brought friends and classmates together. We also organized Earth Day events, youth birding hikes in Malden Park, and participated in World Migratory Bird Day.
This year, Rahi Ahmed, serving as Campus organizer, has continued the popular programming begun in 2022. We are also applying for another Work to Grow grant to secure this position in the future.
To learn more or join in, contact Suzanne Friemann at PIBO.
Also launched in 2022, PIBO’s Graeme Gibson Prismáticos Project, collects previously-loved binoculars in Canada and distributes them to schools and conservationists in Mexico, linking the breeding and wintering grounds of the migrating birds that pass through Pelee Island.
