Each time you observe a Swainson’s Hawk or Wood Thrush on the Bird Migration Explorer, or go to Sharon Audubon Center in Connecticut, you’re seeing the work that Joe Ellis helped make doable. Joe, a longtime board director for Nationwide Audubon Society, enthusiastic birder, and passionate conservationist, handed away earlier this 12 months and left a legacy of conservation that spans the globe.
As a big-picture strategic thinker, Joe envisioned lots of the foundational modifications that Audubon has remodeled the previous twenty years, shepherding Audubon’s work from native excellence to hemispheric affect and particularly specializing in advancing Audubon’s scientific capabilities. As a eager observer with a knack for recognizing rising traits, he was an early proponent that Audubon wanted to increase into Canada and Latin America and switch our scientific rigor towards hemispheric conservation. That analytical thoughts was honed over many years as certainly one of Goldman Sachs’ handiest analysts, and through his profession he was ranked the highest retail market analyst by Institutional Investor 18 years in a row.
However greater than that, Joe actually beloved birds. He regularly requested questions like, “What occurs to the Wooden Thrushes after they depart my yard, and are they taken care of wherever they go?” These weren’t idle musings: Throughout his tenure, Joe would assist develop the methods that enabled Audubon to show these queries into actionable conservation. As a part of his imaginative and prescient to attach native motion to hemispheric affect, Joe made positive that the habitat on his property in western Connecticut was managed to help fowl life and would fortunately showcase the outcomes by taking pals birding in his golf cart.
Joe approached philanthropy the way in which he approached his profession in finance, with rigor and a transparent eye on outcomes, at all times asking what a philanthropic funding would accomplish for birds, and his relationship with Audubon stretched again many many years. He believed the boldest conservation concepts deserved the boldest backing and he gave monetary help accordingly, usually stepping in early, earlier than an thought had confirmed itself, as a result of he trusted the science and the individuals behind it. His seed funding for the Migratory Bird Initiative and the Bird Migration Explorer did greater than launch two signature packages. It gave Audubon the chance to increase hemispherically and helped draw different supporters to our trigger. For his contributions to this work, Joe was awarded the 2021 Environmental Management Award from Audubon Connecticut.
Nearer to residence, his sustained donations strengthened Sharon Audubon Middle and conservation throughout Connecticut and New York, the locations the place his love of birds first took root. The packages he helped launch and the landscapes he cherished carry his generosity ahead right this moment.
Those that knew Joe described him as having a giant New York character—enthusiastic, curious, direct, and authoritative about each enterprise, however tempered with kindness and real look after the individuals with whom he labored and collaborated. He additionally dearly beloved a very good joke.
“Joe Ellis understood the ability of bold concepts and the significance of bringing the precise individuals collectively to make them doable,” says Audubon CEO Dr. Elizabeth Grey. “He pushed us to suppose expansively about our position and helped lay the inspiration for the hemispheric group we’re right this moment. Joe’s legacy will endure throughout Audubon, and he will probably be deeply missed.”
