SEA has selected Bill Oliver of Wintu Audubon and Marily Woodhouse of Battle Creek Alliance as our 2021 Environmental Champions. They will be honored via a Zoom meeting on December 10 at 6:30 pm. Besides awarding these deserving individuals, SEA will present a short update on what SEA has been doing this year.
Marily Woodhouse is the director of Battle Creek Alliance and Defiance Canyon Raptor Rescue in Manton. She will give us a PowerPoint presentation on the threats to our local forests, in particular the Battle Creek watershed, due to cumulative impacts from the over-logging of industrial timberlands. She has been the most vocal opponent of clearcutting in the Shasta County area and will also give us an overview of her work, including rescuing and rehabilitating raptors. Her work to protect forests, watersheds, and wildlife not only supports local ecosystems, but also aims to address fire prevention and build climate resilience. Previously she was the director of the Sierra Club anti-clearcutting campaign for the Motherlode Chapter of California. She also and wrote and directed the film “Clearcut Nation.”
Bill Oliver was one of the founders of the local Wintu Audubon Society chapter in 1976. He has been President four different times, led countless bird walks, and has kept the statistics from the annual Redding Christmas Bird Count for 45 years. This bird count is important citizen science, as it shows the population trends of different bird populations in an area over a long period of time.
Bill worked at the Pacific Southwest Research Station starting in 1963. His early research centered on the health and vigor of young stands of ponderosa pine and true fir in field studies throughout northern California.