Remembering Joe Ellis | Audubon

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 attainable. Joe, a longtime board director for Nationwide Audubon Society, enthusiastic birder, and passionate conservationist, handed away earlier this yr and left a legacy of conservation that spans the globe.  

As a big-picture strategic thinker, Joe envisioned lots of the foundational adjustments that Audubon has revamped the previous 20 years, shepherding Audubon’s work from native excellence to hemispheric impression 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 develop 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’ simplest 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 cherished birds. He frequently requested questions like, “What occurs to the Wooden Thrushes after they go away 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 impression, Joe made certain that the habitat on his property in western Connecticut was managed to assist chicken life and would fortunately showcase the outcomes by taking buddies 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 assist accordingly, typically stepping in early, earlier than an concept 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 applications. It gave Audubon the chance to develop 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 house, 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 applications he helped launch and the landscapes he cherished carry his generosity ahead at the moment.

Those that knew Joe described him as having an enormous 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 cherished an excellent joke.

“Joe Ellis understood the facility of formidable concepts and the significance of bringing the appropriate individuals collectively to make them attainable,” says Audubon CEO Dr. Elizabeth Grey. “He pushed us to assume expansively about our function and helped lay the inspiration for the hemispheric group we’re at the moment. Joe’s legacy will endure throughout Audubon, and he will likely be deeply missed.”