By the IBO team (including IBO alumni Stephanie Coates)
One of the hardest aspects of 2025 has been watching projects slip away that once supported Heather Hayes working for us full time. As many readers will know, she has been a staple on many of our projects: running outreach programming, picking up portions of research and field projects throughout the year, coordinating visitors to Lucky Peak, coordinating our fall raptor workshops, and serving as editor for these annual newsletters!
In the past we had always been able to make things work, assigning Heather portions of projects that could be done remotely from her beautiful home in Idaho’s central mountains. But, with the dramatic downsizing of our budgets for field projects this year, that flexibility to piece together remote duties continued to dry up.
In August we faced the tough decision to furlough Heather’s position due to loss of federal funding and lack of available remote work.
We wanted to include this article to share and appreciate all that Heather has done for IBO over this past decade. And while most of this is retrospective, we did want to mention that we have funding in place to bring Heather back for some part-time summer work next year. So, we hope you will have the chance to see her again!
IBO first met Heather Hayes at one of our early songbird banding workshops at Lucky Peak in 2014. She had recently moved to the region, and after meeting her and spending those first days of intensive training together, we realized Heather was someone we should try to work with in the future as much as we could!
And soon, we had the chance. When former IBO biologist Stephanie Coates was hiring for Long-billed Curlew fieldwork as part of her Master’s thesis research, we needed folks who could spend long dedicated hours in the field searching for curlew nests.
Heather joined that early team and poured her heart into the world of curlews
We spent hours (days? months?) glued to scope eyepieces, waiting for curlews to settle onto a nest. We traded roles directing each other with hand signals to real and sometimes imaginary incubating curlews in seas of cheatgrass, no doubt covering miles on foot in the process. Her field fashion, held together with hot pink duct tape, flagging, and a thousand cheatgrass pins, was unbeatable. Many days, fresh rain and mounting thunderstorms chased us from curlew stake-outs, around the greasy corners of our study area’s dirt roads, and back to pavement.
Heather had an uncanny willingness to approach strangers and strike up conversations with ranchers, recreational shooters, and more. Season-long, consecutive pre-dawn mornings and post-sunset nights in the field had us deliriously locating the nests and collecting the data that would contribute to multiple publications, connect the plummeting trendline dots of local curlew populations, and lead to further research on illegal shooting of wildlife. Her dedication and camaraderie was deeply appreciated and impactful on all aspects of the curlew project and throughout IBO.
As our curlew research expanded, we gained momentum and funding to grow a curlew outreach program. Soon, Heather was heading up our large “Curlews in the Classroom” programming thanks to funding from the Bureau of Land Management.
She visited dozens of schools and thousands of students each year. Her work directly saved curlew lives
in communities where recreational shooting – mostly of legal targets but sometimes including poaching of curlews – was the norm. Thanks to her outreach efforts, we’ve also made connections across the continent with curlews on their wintering grounds. Each winter we get updates about our tracked curlew, Dozer, who spends the winter on the warm beaches of California. Even now, if you wear a Long-billed Curlew shirt around in Idaho, you’re pretty likely to have someone come up and say “Hey, do you know that curlew lady, Heather?”.
When Rob received funding to conduct community-led Short-eared Owl surveys, Heather put her people skills and extraordinary organization capabilities to great use, scheduling and communicating with all our volunteer owl surveyors to complete more than 200 surveys across 4 years. Project WAfLS resulted in major breakthroughs in our understanding of population size and distribution of Short-eared Owls, resulting in five peer-reviewed research manuscripts, and helped put IBO on the map for Short-eared Owl knowledge with agencies and researchers around the world.
Heather also became an invaluable part of our hummingbird research, including becoming one of our core banders.
She also helped launch and maintain Anna’s Hummingbird research for many winters. Many folks recognize Heather’s smiling face and awesome hummingbird facts from public hummingbird events, or time spent waiting for an Anna’s Hummingbird to visit the trap.
Along with these projects you’ve probably heard about, Heather has played a supporting role on so much of our work. Her ability to connect with technicians, landowners, and the public is a super power that has played a key role in so much of our research.
Her impact runs through all of IBO, and losing her as a full-time member of our staff has not been easy.
Thanks to a National Forest Foundation grant and your donations to the project, we’re relieved to share that Heather will be returning at least part-time in 2026 to continue hummingbird research and outreach. We can’t wait for you to see her back in action next summer!
This article is part of our 2025 end of the year newsletter! View the full newsletter here, or click “older posts” below to read the next article. Make sure you don’t miss out on IBO news! Sign up to get our email updates.