Our History
One day in 1994, twelve like-minded individuals, with expertise in a wide variety of professional fields, gathered around a kitchen table in Albuquerque, New Mexico to found a nestling organization that would become Hawks Aloft. Our vision focused on protecting wild birds and their habitats. Our goal was to act with transparency and collaborate with others to build a network that would conduct research on all species of birds and foster future leaders by providing educational programs for youths of all ages. In 2013, we incorporated raptor rescue into our mission in response to overwhelming requests for help with injured birds. We continue these efforts today, in New Mexico and beyond, throughout the Southwest.
Our Approach
We are proud of our commitment to collaboration. We work with federal and state governments, tribal authorities, non-government agencies, businesses, and schools within New Mexico in order to expand our reach and support one another’s goals.
We work in partnership with these various entities to provide meaningful service, education, and support. We believe that conservation, research, and education are all important approaches to the preservation of New Mexico’s birds and their habitats and that this aim cannot be achieved without active participation in our community.
Board of Directors
Claudette Horn
Chairman of the Board
Terry Edwards
Treasurer
KRISTIN BROWN
Director
DR. LINDA CONTOS, DVM
Director
Nate Gowan
Director
Dr. Christine Fiorello, DVM
Director
Staff
Gail Garber
Executive Director
As an artist, writer, and executive director of Hawks Aloft Gail has written three books and published numerous articles in many fields. Back in 1988, she met and fell in love with an educational Red-tailed Hawk. She began working as a volunteer for a local conservation organization, and it wasn’t long before she became a staff member. Today, she thoroughly enjoys all aspects of her work, from working in the field and education programs to caring for a large cadre of non-releasable education birds. In her other life, she is a professional quilt maker (Gail Garber Designs) and often travels to teach and lecture on methods she has developed. Her leisure time is often spent outdoors, searching for birds and more birds, but she and her dogs also enjoy the peace and quiet of their mountain home.
David Buckley
Avian Surveyor
David grew up in the wilds of the New Jersey shore, exploring the beaches, rivers, ponds, and woods of the area (which is to say, the real Jersey Shore). His love for birds and nature started there and he has pursued it ever since. In the 1980’s he settled in the Pacific Northwest, where birding became his central pursuit. He is a graduate of the Seattle Audubon Master Birder program and was a board member of the Washington Ornithological Society.
Since moving to New Mexico in the late 1990s, David has had the good fortune to be involved with Hawks Aloft in a number of ways, including housing and handling various raptors, writing and editing, and conducting breeding-bird surveys. He looks forward to getting out in the field each time and is grateful to be assisting in the collection of data to monitor birds in the Middle Rio Grande Valley.
Susan Coulter
Project Manager
Jacy Dowler
Intern
Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Jacy has held an intense fascination with animals since childhood. This evolved into a passion for birds and their conservation as she worked toward earning a B.S. in Biology, and her exposure to the vibrant research community present at the university motivated her to pursue an avian-centered career. Over the summer of 2025, she assisted with fieldwork and passerine surveys in the Sandia mountains, and conducted bioacoustic research at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge. In her free time, Jacy enjoys birding and wildlife photography, as well as making art and reading about our natural world.
Trevor Fetz, Ph.D
Research Director
Trevor grew up in northeastern Oregon and received a B.A. in English from Whitman College. Upon realizing that his baseball career was not going to advance beyond college, and that he didn’t exactly want to teach English, he decided to pursue an interest in nature. He received an M.S. in Environmental Studies from Southern Oregon University, and it was during that time he discovered an obsession with birds. After completing his M.S., he spent several years working for the Oregon Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit studying Spotted Owls in southwestern Oregon and two years as the project coordinator of a MAPS station for the Medford, Oregon, district of the Bureau of Land Management. He completed his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at New Mexico State University in 2010.
Naturalist
Mackenzie grew up in East Texas with the national forest as her back yard, instilling a strong love for the natural world. With a master’s degree in environmental management and Sustainability from the University of Malta and Integrated Science and Technology from James Madison University, her capstone project documented the work of the Black Mambas Anti-Poaching Unit in South Africa. She also has previous rehabilitation experience with the South Plains Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, beginning as a volunteer and working her way up to the weekend manager at the facility. Mackenzie enjoys all outdoor activities from birding to camping and hiking as well as seeing new places and experiencing diverse cultures around the world, while at home with her family, she enjoys baking. Mackenzie is excited to join the Hawks Aloft team to continue her work in education and rehabilitation. For her, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing an injured animal released back into the wild.
Pat Hawley
Writer/Editor
Pat Hawley is currently working remotely as she helps us with writing, event planning, and education. She is a science writer, behavioral researcher, educator (35+ years!) and, most importantly, a committed animal lover. At present she is a professor at a university in Texas where she lives with her two Boston Terriers, Clementine and Rupert. Her Ph.D. is in animal behavior and her dissertation revealed how Asian elephants (who were at the zoo in East Berlin, Germany) manage their hierarchies (spoiler alert: very peacefully!). Most of her psychological research has been on humans where she applied what she learned from animals to human hierarchical behavior (also peacefully, but also not peacefully). Working with Hawks Aloft brings her full circle to her first and second loves, animals and education. She also has experience in wildlife rehabilitation and raptor handling and has established two very close friendships, one with a crabby male great horned and a very shy female barred owl, both educational ambassadors in Texas. Finally, she is an avid east coast swing dancer and digs those lindy beats!
Jerry Hobart
Project Manager
Born in Ohio, Jerry grew up in New Mexico, where he received a B.S. in mathematics from New Mexico State University. During a 20-year Air Force career he also found the time to study meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. The most exciting part of his weather service was as an Aerial Reconnaissance Weather Officer. This included doing the reconnaissance for the Apollo 15 recovery and also participating in seventeen typhoon penetrations in the western Pacific. Later he earned an M.S. in Systems Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Upon returning to New Mexico, he became interested in birds, especially raptors. That led him to a raptor identification seminar led by Gail Garber; his love of raptors began then. He served as one of the founding board members of Hawks Aloft and has been instrumental in raptor surveys along the levee and back roads of the Rio Grande and Estancia valleys that began in 1995 and continue today. Outside of birding, his interests include woodcarving and benchrest shooting.
Tom Mayer
Avian Surveyor & Project Manager
Tom Mayer grew up in suburban Cincinnati and was educated in Ohio and Pennsylvania. After receiving his PhD in chemistry at Penn State he embarked on a 35-year career in materials and process development for microelectronics fabrication. He retired from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque in 2009. Following retirement, he developed an interest in Geographic Information Systems technology, and for several years worked as a volunteer GIS analyst for The Nature Conservancy. He and his wife, Edel, got hooked on birding while living in the woods of North Carolina and observing birds that showed up at their feeders, their behavior and relationship to the local environment. After meeting Gail Garber in 2015 on a birding trip in Costa Rica, he began to get involved in various projects with Hawks Aloft including a study of traffic noise effects on birds in the Rio Grande bosque, raptor nesting surveys, a waterfowl survey at the Valles Caldera National Preserve, and songbird surveys in the Rio Grande bosque.
Evelyn McGarry
Membership Coordinator &
East Mountain Raptor Rescue Coordinator
Evelyn has long looked to Jane Goodall as her hero. While growing up, she watched every wildlife television show she could and collected newspaper articles about the plight of the world’s wildlife. Her employment history includes working as an admissions supervisor with California's Great America theme park, a store manager at Crown Books and Lechter’s Housewares, a bookkeeper with a printing company, a file clerk with Levi Strauss, and in the last 25 years before retirement, as an eligibility worker with the County of Santa Clara. She began volunteering with Santa Clara County 4-H while working full-time and raising a daughter. She continued to volunteer after retirement with her neighborhood homeowners association, retirement association, local senior center community garden, and with Hawks Aloft. Her current role at Hawks Aloft involves being the membership coordinator, doing educational outreach, mews cleaning, raptor handling, and raptor rescue.
Andrew Orr
GIS Specialist & Biologist
Andy began contributing GIS support to Hawks Aloft in 2024, assisting with mapping and spatial analysis for the organization’s raptor research and conservation projects. Before joining Hawks Aloft, he volunteered with the Peregrine Fund’s California Condor reintroduction project in northern Arizona, where his passion for wildlife and bird photography deepened while documenting one of North America’s most endangered birds. He holds a degree in Environmental Geology and a master’s in Geographic Information Systems from the University of Redlands. Since 2011, Andy has worked as a GIS analyst at Argonne National Laboratory. In addition to raptor photography, he occasionally teaches photography on Antarctic expedition trips and enjoys large-format film photography, scuba diving, and caving.
Click here to contact Andy.
Alex Preston
Field Technician
Alex grew up exploring the eastern forests in his home state of North Carolina. It wasn't until 2020 that he developed a love for birds while pursuing a Masters in Environmental Engineering from NC State. Since moving to New Mexico in 2023, he has developed an appreciation of Western birds and a passion for wildlife conservation. Alex spent the Summer of 2025 crawling, climbing and crashing through Salt Cedar in Socorro surveying Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and Yellow-Billed Cuckoo for the Bureau of Reclamation. This experience led him to seek field work in Albuquerque where he currently works as a Field Technician for Hawks Aloft. When Alex isn't birdwatching he enjoys playing guitar, rock climbing, cooking and spending time with his partner and their pet rabbit Wilbur.
Heather Rissi
Education Coordinator/Writer
Heather grew up enjoying the beautiful Arizona desert. She worked as a veterinary technician and graduated with Bachelor’s in Journalism and Veterinary Science. During that time, she also volunteered and worked for a program called Raptor Free Flight at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It was there that Heather discovered her passion for conservation education and birds of prey. This led her to pursue graduate work that included several classes abroad. She studied Buddhism and conservation in Thailand and human and wildlife conflicts in Kenya. She completed a Masters in Zoology with a focus on Mexican gray wolf conservation education.
Along the way she met her husband in Northern Arizona and then moved to Oregon where they started a family. She recently moved back to the southwest to enjoy the warmer weather and be closer to her extended family. After returning to the southwest, and prior to starting at Hawks Aloft Inc. she volunteered for another free-flight raptor program, Birds on Sky, in Lakeside, Arizona. In her spare time, Heather enjoys writing, photography, gardening, and learning skills needed to develop her family’s homestead.
Liz Roberts
Educator/Naturalist
Lizzie grew up in Kent, England, travelled the world, and ended up in Albuquerque where she started her family. She has an adventurous spirit, a creative mind, and a love for the outdoors that she incorporates into her teaching. A wonderful educator, with decades of experience homeschooling her children, teaching at Wildlife Rescue Inc., Lizzie has rejoined the staff at Hawks Aloft. Liz began work here as an educator 16 years ago before taking a break to pursue her other passion: pottery. Now an accomplished professional potter, she has found more time to return to Hawks Aloft as a part-time educator. Lizzie currently houses several of our Avian ambassadors who are very lucky to be in such good hands. We are very happy to have her rejoin our team. Be sure to look out for LizRoberts.Art at any New Mexico craft show.
PD St Clair
Administrative Assistant
Originally from California, PD holds a Bachelor of Science in Human Services and brings more than a decade of experience in corporate health promotion. She later transitioned into roles more closely aligned with her lifelong interest in birds and the natural world. A formative experience in Allenspark, Colorado, where she observed a remarkable gathering of Evening Grosbeaks at backyard feeders, served as a pivotal moment that deepened her commitment to birding and conservation.
An avid birder, PD travels internationally to observe bird species in diverse habitats. Her interests also include bird photography, gardening, and nature-based recreation. PD’s experience includes working at multiple Wild Birds Unlimited locations and continues to serve on the marketing team for the local Wild Birds Unlimited stores. She is also on the Field Naturalist team for ZEISS Optics promoting their products at festivals and other events.