Officers
Chris Wood
President
Chris has been a birder, naturalist, and photographer most of his life, especially the past 45 years since studying under Dr. Noble Proctor at Southern Connecticut State University. Professionally, he managed Connecticut state agencies with environmental and economic regulation responsibilities, managed land and conservation programs for The Nature Conservancy, and practiced land use planning as a consultant for governmental agencies and private interests. Chris contributes articles and photographs regularly to The Connecticut Warbler. He has served on the Avian Records Committee of Connecticut and chaired the Breeding Bird Atlas steering committee for the first Atlas project in the 1980s. Chris is also a founding member of the Western Connecticut Bird Club.
Cynthia Ehlinger
Vice President
After developing her birding skills with mentors in Cape May, NJ and Brooklyn, NY, Cynthia moved to Riverside with her husband and son in 1989. Retired from a career in marketing and science at the Bruce Museum, Cynthia leads bird walks at Greenwich Point and serves as a volunteer hawk watcher at Quaker Ridge Hawk Watch. Since 2016, she has been the compiler for the Greenwich-Stamford Christmas Bird Count. She is expanding her computer skills by working on the COA website and helps manage COA’s Facebook page and publicity.
Allison Black
Secretary
Allison Black is a Norwich, Connecticut native and began birding after taking an ornithology course while completing her undergraduate degree. She has turned her love of birds into a career, working in various roles for non-profits and state organizations alike. She currently works as a certified Protected Species Observer (PSO) for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), spending weeks out at sea surveying for seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles. Allison is the founder and compiler of the Norwich Christmas Bird Count and serves as the chair of COA’s Workshop and Mini-Grants Committees. When not on a ship somewhere in the ocean, Allison resides in Norwich with her husband, Ryan.
Paul Wolter
Treasurer
Paul’s first birding experience, at the age of thirteen, was holding a male Eurasian Golden Oriole at a banding site behind his family’s house in the English countryside. He continued some birding through high school but then sports, college, work and a family of his own led to a prolonged gap, before re-discovering his interest in birds in 2009. Since then Paul has been an active member of the Connecticut birding community, joined later by his wife Maureen. Together they have experienced birding trips in many US states, Canadian provinces and a handful of other countries. For a few years Paul was the Secretary of the New Haven Bird Club, for whom he also led walks. Paul became the Treasurer of the COA in 2015.
Board Members
Joe Attwater
Class of 2026
Joe is the Conservation & Education Coordinator for Connecticut Audubon Society’s Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center in Old Lyme. He assists in the K-12 education programs and leads bird walks and talks for the center. He became interested in birds in high school while watching Belted Kingfishers, Hooded Mergansers, and Great Blue Herons fishing near his home, and received a degree in Wildlife & Conservation Biology. Joe is a native New Londoner, and when he’s not teaching he enjoys birding his local patches and chasing rarities.
Gilles Carter
Class of 2026
After a 14-year stint as an agricultural entrepreneur, farmer, distributor, importer, and manufacturer of private label food brands in the jam and fruit spread industry, Gilles sold his business in 1996 and began a second career writing and producing video pieces for nonprofits, and creating educational and documentary programming. For the last two decades or so, he has been developing educational-historical documentaries for television.
Gilles has a BA in philosophy from Princeton University, is bilingual (French) and is a passionate outdoorsman and sailor who has traveled extensively. He’s been photographing and filming birds – both as a hobby and professionally for the last seven years.
Sharon Dellinger
Class of 2025
Sharon is a lifelong CT resident. She’s been an R.N. since 1986 and has worked as an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (A.P.R.N.) since 1998 in the field of hepatology/ gastroenterology. She has been a nature lover as long as she can remember and a bird lover since her great aunt rescued a baby Robin from a squirrel when she was in elementary school. She has been on the COA Board since 2018 providing assistance with the COA Birding Calendar. She is also secretary for the Mattabeseck Audubon Society, headquartered in Middletown, CT. She is co-compiler for the Salmon River Christmas Bird Count. She resides in Colchester with her husband, Roy.
Adam Fasciolo
Class of 2025
Adam has been surrounded by birding enthusiasts his entire life. And so how could he not become one too? At a very young age, his mother Grace would play the Bird Sound records that came in National Geographic Society books. That’s how they first identified an Eastern Whip-poor-will. Later, his wife Jo got him to come along on birding walks. That’s when he became fully invested in birding as a hobby and as a passion.
Adam is determined to help raise awareness about the issue of bird strikes and how to reduce their occurrences, especially in urban glass buildings. He and his wife enjoy international travel, which always includes birding. Adam has had a career in Banking and Corporate Treasury and is a lifelong Connecticut resident.
Jo Fasciolo
Class of 2025
Jo Fasciolo has had a life long enthusiasm for nature. The saying, “easily distracted by birds” accurately describes her. Jo’s introduction to birds was by her grandfather who taught her to patiently hold out her hand, full of seed, and wait for a Black-capped Chickadee to land and feed. She and her husband, Adam, reside in Norwalk and spend their free time in the field birding and studying CT birds. Jo is a middle school math teacher for the Westport Schools. She shares a “bird of the day” with her students so they can further their abilities to notice and wonder about the world around them and why it is so important to protect it.
Rick Gedney
Class of 2025
Rick has been a birder since 1974. He had a life long interest in natural history, which started to focus on ornithology after studying under Noble Proctor at SCSU in the 1970s. “It was like skin diving on the land when you knew how to open your eyes and ears to the birds around us,” he says. Rick works in the cabinet and construction industry but gets out into the natural world as often as possible birding, boating, fishing and sailing. Living close to Hammonasset Beach State Park made for many quick getaways through the years.
Peter Grund
Class of 2027
A native of Sweden, Peter grew up in a rural area where birds were always “around.” His strongest memory of a bird experience in his youth comes from flushing a Western Capercaillie in the woods around his family home and being awed! But it was not until he moved to the US in the early 2000s that he became involved in birding and bird-related activities. And he is now “never not birding”! He is especially interested in bird songs: the differences in song among different bird species and variations of songs within particular species. He attributes this interest to his profession as a trained linguist who studies and teaches about variation and change in the English language at Yale University.
Jim Hunter
Class of 2026
Jim started volunteering n 1987 at The Nature Center for Environmental Activities where his birding and passion for nature really took off. He went to Southern Connecticut State University and studied under Dr. Noble Proctor and majored in Biology for Secondary Education. He spent about 20 years working for the Nature Center (now Earthplace) and taught middle school and high school volunteers about all facets of nature. He led natural history trips all over the US for them and taught high school for 20 years, mostly biology and AP Environmental Science. He has had the opportunity to study penguins in South Africa and Koalas in Africa, but it is birding in the US that has always been there. After living in Fairfield County for almost 40 years he has recently relocated to Woodbury and is learning a much different kind of back yard birding than he has ever known.
Kimberly Jannerone
Class of 2026
Kimberly Jannarone is Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. This is the same program she attended in the late 1990s and where her birding began, with a downy woodpecker outside her apartment window. Over twenty years later, she chose her home in New Haven based on its proximity to East Rock Park.
From 2001–19, Kimberly was Professor of Theater Arts and affiliate faculty with the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. and History of Consciousness Ph.D. programs at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She spent the time she wasn’t making theater birding the Bay Area, doing habitat restoration work, and leading bird walks at Golden Gate Park. She looks forward to working on birding and conservation projects in Connecticut.
Aidan Kiley
Class of 2025
Micky Komara
Class of 2027
Micky owns MK Communications LLC, which provides technical writing to firms primarily in the AEC sector. She also serves as the administrative assistant and volunteer coordinator for the Madison Land Conservation Trust. For many years, she was the Natural Cook columnist for regional and national publications, writing articles that focused on such issues as the use of pesticides and antibiotics in agriculture, artificial sweeteners, toxins in freshwater fish, factory farming, and sustainability.
Although a lifelong backyard birdwatcher, she actually began to bird in earnest in 2014. “Birding is a journey, and the great thing about it is that you are always looking up.”
Micky is also well known for her birding of Hammonasset Beach State Park, where she served as its block coordinator for the CT Bird Atlas, and for her advocacy for bird-friendly management decisions at the park.
Corey Leamy
Class of 2027
Corey, who is curious by nature and knowledgeable by intention, is an avid birder and lover of the natural world. Among friends she is known as the person who can almost always answer the texted question “what is this” in response to a picture of a bird, or in some cases, a picture of a teeny tiny blob that might be somewhat avian in nature. She graduated from UConn Avery Point in 2014 with a Bachelor’s in Marine Sciences and currently works at a marine survey company. Her eBird list of incidentals spans from CT to WI and down to TX from days spent trailering work boats from project to project. In 2024, her birding adventures turned international, with an extraordinary trip to Colombia. But she’ll take any opportunity to bird, whether it’s at home, through the car window, or on an adventure with friends and family.
Ryan MacLean
Class of 2027
Ryan is the Bird Education Specialist at the Greenwich Audubon Center and conducts in-person programs for school groups, bird tours and private adventures as well as virtual webinars on natural history subjects. He was the official hawk counter for Quaker Ridge Hawk Watch for six seasons and has counted hawks professionally at the Braddock Bay Spring Hawk Watch in Rochester, NY.
Brian O’Toole
Class of 2027
Brian started birding at a young age in Greenwich. As a high school student, he began monitoring Eastern Bluebird houses, leading bird walks, and with the help of an Audubon scholarship, attended Camp Chiricahua for young birders in southeastern Arizona. He served as a board member for the Greenwich Audubon Society, was the compiler for the Greenwich-Stamford Christmas Bird Count as well as the paid hawk counter for the Quaker Ridge Hawkwatch for many years. Brian worked as a naturalist, camp counselor and store manager at the Greenwich Audubon Center and was a Visitor Services Manager at Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo. Currently he is the Visitor Services Manager at the Stamford Museum & Nature Center in Stamford, CT, and resides in Danbury.
Bill Rankin
Class of 2026
Bill spent many years walking East Rock Park, mapping its trees, flowers, and the relics of its manicured past, before noticing a Northern Flicker bouncing along the ground one day. He immediately went home and Googled phrases like “bird red head black dots what is it?!” He’s been hooked on birds ever since, with a particular fondness for the understory migrants of East Rock and the shorebirds of Sandy Point. Bill grew up in the Midwest, teaching ecology and wilderness survival as a Boy Scout counselor, before training as an architect and then re-training as a cartographer and historian. He now teaches the history of mapping, environmental science, and data visualization at Yale.
Dan Rottino
Class of 2026
Dan is a lifelong environmentalist and retired high school chemistry teacher of over 20 years. He has an MS degree in chemistry from UCONN. His careers as an environmental laboratory and hazardous waste recycling chemists gave him a foundation to help high school chemistry, physics, and earth science students make the critical environmental connections between their personal lives and our global society. Dan’s family enjoyed camping and hopscotching through America’s national parks and birding hotspots in a big year style. Dan won the eBirder of the year for 2016 by meeting the monthly eBird challenge, and is currently an Osprey monitoring steward on the lower Connecticut River. Dan works to make the world a better place by supporting environmental conservation and making environmentally sustainable personal choices.
Molly Zahn
Class of 2027
Molly Zahn is a faculty member in Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School. Her love of birds and birding goes back to her childhood in central Wisconsin, where she won her first field guide (Peterson) at a meeting of the Aldo Leopold Audubon Society when she was in 3rd grade. Since then, she has birded wherever life has taken her. After college in Minneapolis and grad school in Oxford, England and South Bend, Indiana, she lived and worked from 2008-2022 in Lawrence, Kansas, where she gained a deep appreciation for the prairie landscape and for North America’s central flyway. She has led bird walks for Jayhawk Audubon (now Lawrence Bird Alliance) and (with poet Megan Kaminski) for Humanities Kansas’s “Words of a Feather” program, and more recently for Yale Divinity students. Coming from a long line of outdoorsfolks, Molly is passionate about conservation and habitat restoration, especially the idea that people can make a difference for birds and other wildlife in whatever spaces they have access to, no matter how small.
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