This article was produced by Capital & Main.
John James Audubon, the author and artist of the foundational 1827-1838 work The Birds of America, is widely hailed as the father of American birding. Audubon was also an avowed racist who bought and sold enslaved people to fund his work and travels; robbed Native American grave sites to aid in eugenics research; and killed birds by the thousands, usually to paint them, but sometimes just for fun.
In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the racial justice reckoning that followed, the National Audubon Society, one of the country’s oldest and largest birding groups, began to take a long hard look at its controversial namesake. That year, the editors of Audubon magazine, the organization’s flagship publication, commissioned a series of essays looking at Audubon and his often unsavory past.
Among those asked to contribute was J. Drew Lanham, a wildlife ecology professor at Clemson University and self-proclaimed lifelong “black birder.” Lanham had joined the society’s board of directors in 2017, but had resigned in protest in early 2020 because he felt the organization wasn’t doing enough about racial equity. “And now here was Audubon magazine asking me to write a reveal of John James Audubon,” he said. “I was sort of in disbelief.”
For many Audubon Society members and bird lovers, Lanham’s 2021 essay was their first look at the ugly side of the 19th century naturalist. And what a look it was. In one section, Lanham calls Audubon “a racist, slave-owning birding god.” In another, he describes how Audubon bragged about the night he spent with a family of escaped slaves, only to return them to the man who had enslaved them. Lanham titled his essay “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?”
“We all thought, that’s a great question,” said Claire Catania, executive director of Birds Connect Seattle (formerly the Seattle Audubon Society). “What do we do?”
Lanham’s essay, along with other pieces in the series, sparked a heated discussion among Audubon chapters across the country that continues to this day. How can chapters keep calling themselves Audubon now that everyone knows what sort of person Audubon really was?
At its heart, the debate over names has centered on longstanding issues of inclusion and access to a community where people of color have historically been made to feel neither included nor welcome. To date, about 60 chapters — admittedly, a small fraction of the Society’s nearly 500 — have dropped or have plans to drop “Audubon” from their names.
This May, Indiana’s Amos Butler Audubon Society became the Bird Alliance of Central Indiana, dropping not one, but two controversial namesakes (a beloved birder in Indiana, Butler successfully petitioned for the forced sterilization of the state’s “feeble-minded”). The following month, the Sacramento Audubon Society, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, officially changed its name to the Sacramento Bird Alliance.
The debates over names have been fraught. “We lost donors, we lost members,” said Travis Kemnitz, executive director of the San Diego Bird Alliance, which changed its name from the San Diego Audubon Society in 2024. When the subject came up at board meetings, he recalled, the debates would derail talk of anything else.
“There wasn’t yelling or fists pounding on the table,” Catania said. “That’s not how we do things in Seattle. But there was definite displeasure.”
The May 2020 Central Park birding incident, in which a white dogwalker falsely accused Christian Cooper, a Black birder, of trying to assault her, added further fuel to the fire, and impelled chapters to consider questions beyond just what to call themselves. Why was “black while birding” still such an issue, even in diverse, urban areas like New York City? What could chapters do to increase diversity among their own ranks? And why were so many chapters so overwhelmingly white in the first place?
“You’ve seen the stats,” said Tammah Watts, a San Diego Bird Alliance board member. “Traditionally, it’s white, upper income, upper education males who have done the birding.”
The largest debate over the Audubon name took place within the National Audubon Society itself. In addition to the Audubon magazine series, which ran from 2020 to 2022, the national organization spent more than a year, starting in early 2022, conducting an intensive survey of thousands of staff, donors, members and volunteers, as well as hundreds of students and people of color outside of the organization. During the three-year process, local chapters waited, some patiently, some less so, for the national organization to release its findings. But they were never released.
In a 2023 email to chapter leaders, the National Audubon Society said that its board had “decided to maintain the confidentiality of its deliberations, including the materials they reviewed.”
Many local chapters were hoping that the Audubon Society would ultimately change its name, to make it simpler for them and others to follow suit. “It would have been a signal for us to go ahead and change our name,” said Watts, “because here’s the National chapter changing theirs.”
In 2022, Seattle became the first large chapter to announce that it would change its name, regardless of what the National Audubon Society did. “We got tired of waiting,” Catania said. “We made the announcement public because we wanted the national organization to lead a collaborative effort nationwide. Unfortunately, they did not.”
On March 15, 2023, three years after that first Audubon essay, the national organization announced it was going to retain the Audubon name after all. The news made headlines, from birding websites to the New York Times. Much of the coverage was negative. Changing the name, the organization explained in a statement posted to its website, might impact their mission to protect birds and their habitats. And besides, Susan Bell, the then-board chair said in the post, “The name has come to represent so much more than the work of one person, but a broader love of birds and nature.” In the end, the group’s leaders seemed to say, it was all about the birds.
Or not. “They were risk averse,” Catania said of the National’s decision. “There were unknown impacts of shedding the name, because it comes with a cachet and power that they did not want to risk losing.”
“It was money,” Lanham said.
“I’ve served on many, many boards, and at the end of the day, there’s a bottom line that sometimes is the ethical bottom line, but more times than not, it’s a green bottom line that isn’t all about conservation,” he added. “When that calculation came up, they didn’t want to take that risk.”
The National Audubon Society did not respond to requests for comment. But in a message sent to chapter leaders a month after the decision, the society acknowledged that one of the factors the board weighed was the “anticipated operational, legal, and financial implications of undertaking a name change and rebranding process.”
The backlash was swift. The society’s union, CWA Local 1180-Bird Union, a collective of 260 communications workers that had dropped “Audubon” from its name a month earlier, criticized the National’s “decision to double down on celebrating a white supremacist.” Three members of the society’s board of directors resigned in protest. Several chapters openly criticized the decision and announced plans to change their own names, despite the National’s decision to keep its own.
“I was shocked and extremely disappointed,” Catania recalled. “And also angry, because we could have moved on. We could have been using that time more productively to form coalitions of the chapters that were inclined to change their name.”
“It was really an opportunity to set a new direction and engage a whole new and diverse audience in birding,” said Kemnitz, of the San Diego Bird Alliance. “I felt like it was a huge miss.”
Since then, many of the largest chapters in the nation, from San Francisco to Chicago to New York City, have chosen to distance themselves from Audubon and his legacy. The most recent was the 4,500-member Houston chapter, whose rebrand as Birds Houston launches this month.
Many cited their own research showing that the Audubon name had either a negative connotation — ironically, much of it generated by the society’s own articles about the man — or no connotation at all. When Catania talked to people about the Audubon Society, she said, many didn’t know that Audubon was even a person; a few thought she was talking about the Autobahn, Germany’s legendary highway system. “When they looked at me blankly, I’d say, the bird people.”
Wisely, nearly every chapter that changed their name put “bird” in their new title, from Birds Georgia to the Detroit Bird Alliance. “Now I can just say I’m with Birds Connect Seattle, and everyone understands,” Catania said.
The Birds Connect Seattle booth at the at 2025 Refuge Outdoor Festival. Photo courtesy Birds Connect Seattle.
Similarly, all of the chapters who changed their names also dropped “Society” from their titles. “What does “society’ even mean?” said Kemnitz. “It does seem kind of exclusive, classist almost. When people heard the name Audubon Society, they thought of older white individuals wearing khakis, and that didn’t speak to them.”
Many chapters used the name change to signal the group’s broader goals of welcoming individuals and communities who might have otherwise been wary of joining.
“It makes it easier when you have a name that’s basically neutral,” Watts said. “Not everybody knows about the name change, but if they did, and you’re still sticking with the name, it could suggest to some folks a positionality that may not feel inviting.”
“When we actually chose our new name, we got overwhelmingly positive feedback,” Catania said. “People were saying, ‘I hadn’t donated before, but now I’m donating and joining.’”
Several chapters began hosting events and hikes tied to Black Birders Week, which is held annually in an attempt to “reclaim the Black community’s role in environmental spaces” (the founding group’s logo is a black fist clutching a pair of binoculars) and increase the visibility of black birders. Chapters also hosted programs targeting younger birders, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and newcomers to the hobby. “We ask folks, ‘Are you bird-curious?,’” Catania said. “Then come to our event.”
The programs seem to be working, local chapter leaders say. “We’ve seen a great deal more birders of color,” Kemnitz said. “We’ve had increases in diversity both within our organization and among the members who are participating.”
Even so, chapters have noticed the number of name changes tapering off lately. Some of that is expected — if chapters were inclined to change their names, they’ve already had five years or so to do it. But some suspect that the current administration has something to do with the slowing.
“I think people are pretty concerned about making changes that might endanger federal funds,” Kemnitz said. “You can lose those funds if you use them for anything that’s focused on DEI. There were a lot of federal agencies that had to deal with that, like Fish and Wildlife, so that made a lot of people hesitant. You don’t want to raise your head too high.”
“I think there’s a lot of fear in drawing this administration’s attention, and changing your name is one way to draw attention,” Catania said. “I do think the current political climate is having a chilling effect. But my cynical self also thinks that people will look for any excuse to not make a change they don’t actually want to make.”
As for Lanham, he’d prefer chapters not to change their names, if that’s all they’re going to do. “Slapping a new name on something means very little,” he said. “I saw some organizations that didn’t change their name, but they were asking the difficult questions, and really suffering the slings and arrows for doing that. And I saw others that were considering name changes, but they were more concerned about the name changes, it seemed, than they were what was underlying that name.”
What began as a simple question — what to do about John James Audubon — has become an ongoing project for Lanham. Lately, he’s been working on a novella that imagines a letter exchange between Henry David Thoreau, the famed naturalist and essayist, and Audubon, in which Thoreau takes Audubon to task as an enslaver.
And while he’s no longer a member of the Audubon Society, Lanham still gives lectures and presentations about birding. For many, feelings about Audubon and the name change debate are still as raw as ever. “I’ve seen people walk out of a room because they didn’t want that demigod defaced,” he said. “So it’s been a long journey for me, this joust with a dead ornithologist. But I can’t put it down.”
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