Birds Connect Seattle's Executive Director Claire Catania toured the nonprofit's new headquarters in downtown Seattle on a recent Friday morning.
"What we have here in our museum space. Drum roll. We have our bird skin collection," she said, while opening a white cabinet.
The nonprofit has two of these cabinets that hold drawers filled with hundreds of bird specimens from chickadees to grouse to hawks and falcons. These specimens were kept in a basement at the organization's previous home in the Northeast Seattle neighborhood of Wedgewood.
Catania said people had to have a special reason to access them before the move.
"And now we have easily accessible to anyone walking in off the street — actual museum specimens to talk about those birds and see just how beautiful they are in the hand," Catania said.
That's just one benefit of Birds Connect Seattle's new space located on Olive Way between 6th and 7th avenues. The birding nonprofit earlier this year sold the building it previous called home for nearly 30 years. It lacked ADA compliance and wasn't easy to get to using public transportation.
The new rented space is actually smaller than the previous headquarters, but its layout will allow the nonprofit to put on events that happened offsite or didn't exist. It's now hosting author talks and educational events, such as Wednesday lunches with a rotating roster of bird enthusiasts.
Plus, it's just a few blocks away from the Westlake Light Rail Station. Catania said she hopes that proximity will allow the organization to reach more people and have a greater impact on conservation efforts.
"I mean, we all loved and deeply miss our Wedgewood home, but it was very much a neighborhood space," she said. "And we are serving a much larger service area than the northeast quadrant of the city of Seattle."
The nonprofit aims to serve bird enthusiasts from Renton up to the Snohomish County line.
Joshua Morris, the organization's conservation director, said that accessibility and being able to show off bird specimens is a "hook to lead people into conversation."
"Connecting with birds provides an opportunity to invite people into conversations about conservation and inspire them to take action to protect birds — to protect the ecosystems they depend on," he said.
Drawing people into the space is one piece of the puzzle for the nonprofit.
Their gift shop sells a film for windows to prevent birds from crashing into them. It provides postcards for people to fill out and send to decision makers, asking them to adopt bird-safe building standards. And, Morris said the new location will allow the organization to spend more time at Seattle's City Hall.
"A lot of what we try to do has to be done through policy and we want to spend more time at City Hall," he said. "We want to spend more time engaging with council members and the other decision makers."
In the meantime, if you're having a hard time identifying a bird spotted on a walk or a jog — Birds Connect Seattle might be able to help you out.
