Girl Scouts was originally a way for her to make friends. 

Now it’s a way for her to protect her passion.

 Senior Audrey Chadwick has been a Girl Scout for seven years. As many older Girls Scouts do, she decided to strive towards her Gold award. 

The Gold Award is the highest award in Girl Scouts, it requires scouts to complete a project that addresses and helps solve an issue either in their community or universally. The project must be sustainable and requires scouts to spend a minimum of 80 hours on the project.

For Chadwick, her passion for wildlife and birds gave her a set direction she wanted to follow.

“I knew I wanted to do something with wildlife because that is my special interest and I knew I really liked birds… I knew Birds of Prey was like my top priority, or top choice of where I wanted to do my project,” Chadwick said. 

Once she set up communication with Birds of Prey, Chadwick discovered a problem to address pretty quickly. A new enclosure for waiting and shore birds.

“So basically when Birds of Prey first opened, they were specifically for prey birds, which are seen as raptors, vultures and hawks and that sort of thing, like eagles. But since we are a coastal area, as they have grown and become more well known, they get a lot of, waiting and shore birds, which are still technically birds of prey, but they aren’t considered raptors.They require a whole different type of care and level of care,”Chadwick said. 

Once her idea was approved, Chadwick held a fundraiser at Birds of Prey. When she raised enough money, the building process began. WIth a team of family and friends, Chadwick was able to construct these enclosures.

“These enclosures can help these specific types of birds to  learn the specific things they need compared to raptors. They have live fishing ponds now, where they learn how to fish and stuff. So that’s the impact it has and I hope that they’ll stay intact for a long time because of the changes I made,” Chadwick said. 

“About two weeks ago or a week after I did my project,I heard that they had finally put birds in my enclosures.So that was really rewarding to hear and probably the most exciting part so far.”

Senior Mackenzie Lyons was a part of the team that helped Chadwick build the enclosures. She sees the value and importance of Chadwick’s project.

  “So many birds every year get hurt because of people or other reasons, and so having a place where these birds can be safe and get nursed back to health is definitely really important, especially since some of them are endangered birds,” Lyons said.

“I know it’s already helped some because birds have used those enclosures, and I know some of those birds have been released, so I think it’ll definitely help in the future for those injured birds.”