Spokane’s Lindell Haggin honored as Audubon Volunteer of the Year

From news services

Lindell Haggin, a 50-year member of the Spokane Audubon chapter and longtime board treasurer, was honored among 25 state chapters with Audubon Washington’s 2020 Helen Engle Volunteer of the Year Award the Spokane Audubon Society announced on Tuesday.

The award was inspired by longtime Tahoma chapter member Helen Engle, who helped create the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. She was honored with the group’s lifetime achievement award during the 2013 National Audubon Convention and died at 93 last year. The award was established to recognize a volunteer who has contributed outstanding service to the Audubon cause at the chapter, state, regional or flyway level.

Haggin said she shares the award with her late mother-in-law Margaret Haggin, who, with her husband Morey, founded the Spokane chapter, provided lifelong bird education for the community and inspired her to follow in her footsteps.

Lindell most recently led the Spokane chapter’s contributions to the state’s 2014-19 Sagebrush Songbird Survey in conjunction with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

She recruited, organized and helped train and equip dozens of other volunteers, contacted private landowners to secure access permission for many of the survey sites, and rounded up and compiled survey results. For this leadership task alone, Lindell was considered deserving of this year’s award.

As a retired teacher, Lindell has long served on the chapter’s education committee, responding to many requests annually from schools, youth camps, scouts and adult clubs for presentations on birds and their habitats. She has led and participated in many multiyear, interagency volunteer projects, including songbird banding, waterfowl surveys, threatened prairie grouse monitoring, annual Christmas Bird Counts and field trips. She represents the chapter at the annual state and regional conferences, webinars and training sessions, most recently helping shift from physical meetings to on-line Zoom meetings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Haggin is also an accomplished photographer. Many of her beautiful bird photos have been featured in the chapter’s annual calendar.