Celebrating America Through Local Eyes

Brad has worked on advocating conservation of important lands, water resources, wildlife, and restoration of the western Everglades professionally since 2001. Prior to working for Audubon Western Everglades, he played trombone for the Naples Philharmonic for ten years. 

For Marco Island, he has co-founded the Collier Shorebird Stewardship Program in 2010 with Lindsey Addison, now a prominent shorebird biologist and expert in American Oystercatchers for Audubon North Carolina. They focused on Sand Dollar Spit and the beaches at the south end of Tigertail Lagoon at a time when shorebirds around the Gulf were being heavily impacted by the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill disaster. They also collaborated with Audubon Florida, Rookery Bay, the City of Marco Island, and FWC to make this effective. The program is now led by Audubon Florida's Shorebird Biologist Megan Hatten for Sand Dollar and Second Chance Sandbar, and Audubon Western Everglades' biologist, Brittany Piersma at Caxambas Shoals and Dickman's Island and the winter shorebird program at Clam Pass and Marco beaches.

AWE, led by Cornell and Piersma, worked in 2019/20 with FWC and City Councilor Jared Grifoni to create Florida's first Florida Burrowing Owl Safe Harbor Program to encourage Marco homeowners to accept a "starter burrow" in their yard in an effort to protect more breeding owls on already developed lots. The program has been increasingly successful.

If you could travel back in time to one event in our Island’s history, which one would it be?

I would love to meet the people who built Marco's shell mounds - the Calusa and the unknown people before the Calusa whose middens and burial mounds are in the City and surrounding barrier islands. It is fascinating to me that their legacy is an entire island community of coastal maritime hammock plants like gumbo limbo and mahogany, and wildlife like the state-threatened gopher tortoise, and life-sustaining high-elevation shell mounds. This unique ecological community co-evolved for many centuries with these ancient humans and our present community of the City of Marco Island is the heir to that natural and cultural treasure.

What does ‘freedom’ mean to you?

Freedom is the enviable state we enjoy in this immensely diverse and beautiful country which enables us all to be in community with each other. This freedom comes with promising to protect everyone's interests and have each other's backs. Freedom allows me to feel confident that if my well-being is threatened, my neighbors and fellow citizens will be there for me. Freedom requires from each of us responsibility for upholding and guarding the integrity of all our community relationships, with compassionate care and vigilance, and promoting dedicated leaders. To me, freedom grows from the ecological principle of cooperation, keeping us all healthy and vital members of this globally unique, 250-year-old democratic experiment. 

If you would like to nominate a Veteran or local hero to be featured in Celebrating America Through Local Eyes, contact Brittany Richards at brittany@coastalbreezenews.com.