STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

A little more than an hour from Sun Valley--near Twin Falls--lives a bird that exists nowhere else in the world.

The Cassia crossbill, a somewhat nondescript finch dependent on a single type of lodgepole pine cone, draws birders from across the globe to one relatively isolated corner of Idaho.

People from vastly different backgrounds and geographies, all converging on the same place for the same small bird.

Dr. Elizabeth Gray served as Global Managing Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Climate Change program prior to taking the helm of Audubon.

"Now think about that," Dr. Elizabeth Gray told those attending the 11th annual Sun Valley Forum this week. "Birds do this everywhere."

Gray is the CEO of the National Audubon Society--the first woman to hold the role since the organization's founding in 1905.

And this week she came to Sun Valley to deliver a sweeping address titled "Following the Birds: Conservation Without Borders" during the four-day Forum held at Sun Valley Resort.

A trained ornithologist with more than 30 years in the field, she painted a picture of a natural world in crisis — and of unlikely coalitions forming across the hemisphere to meet it.

She arrived in Sun Valley fresh from a remote field site at Teshekpuk Lake in Alaska's western Arctic. It not only is the largest lake in Arctic Alasa but it’s one of the most ecologically important places in the world.

Getting there required a bush plane and miles of tundra crossing through the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, flying over a landscape where extraordinary natural beauty and the steady westward expansion of oil development exist side by side.

"There's no cell service, there's no visible infrastructure for as far as you can see," Gray said. "Just open tundra, frozen lakes and rivers, migrating caribou, and enormous skies just waiting to be filled with birds returning after traveling thousands of miles across the hemisphere."

Needless to say, she added with a laugh, after several days sleeping in Arctic conditions, she was happy to be at Sun Valley Resort.

But, she added, visiting a place like Teshekpuk Lake changes how you think about conservation. What happens in Alaska does not stay in Alaska. Decisions made there ripple across ecosystems, communities and economies throughout the hemisphere.

"One of the things that I just love about birds is that they don't recognize our borders, our political divisions or our industry sectors," she said. "They experience the world as one connected system. And, increasingly, I believe that the future is going to depend on our ability to do the same."

Audubon, Gray said, consider birds a superpower. They show earlier and more clearly than almost anything else on Earth when something fundamental is changing in the natural world.

There is a reason people have long used the phrase "the canary in the coal mine," referring to the canaries miners took underground to cue them when they were being endangered by carbon monoxide or methane.

Changing migration patterns, familiar species disappearing, populations thinning across vast geographies — these are not isolated events but signals of a broader shift.

The numbers are staggering. In Gray's lifetime alone, North America has lost three billion birds. Audubon's latest research shows that across Latin America and the Caribbean, 83 percent of forest-dependent birds are at risk of extinction under current climate scenarios.

Those shifts reach far beyond the birds themselves to the systems humans depend on — clean water, healthy forests, productive coastlines, resilient communities and stable food systems.

"Today, birds are not giving us a subtle warning," Gray said. "They are telling us that we are facing a global crisis that needs action now."

That understanding was forged in the field. After graduate school, Gray spent time in Hawaii studying endangered honeycreepers--birds found nowhere else on Earth. She watched as they declined under the combined assault of introduced predators, habitat loss and a warming climate.

Later, working on conservation projects in central Appalachia, she focused on protecting large forest landscapes while helping local economies transition.

Work like that often gets described through a single lens, she said — a habitat project, a carbon project, an economic development effort. But those descriptions are limited and misleading.

"When forests remain intact, carbon stays in the ground. Water systems improve. Wildlife corridors are reconnected. And communities gain new economic opportunities," she said. "This work was really about restoring function across an entire system."

That systems-level thinking now drives Audubon's guiding star. Gray calls it "bending the bird curve" — halting and ultimately reversing the decline of birds across the Americas.

It is an approach with deep roots. Gray reminded the audience that Audubon itself was born during a crisis of connection between markets, culture and the natural world. At the turn of the 20th century, birds were being slaughtered at industrial scale to supply the fashion industry's appetite for feathered hats. Entire species were pushed to the brink of extinction for a trend.

The organization was founded in 1905 by two women, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall. They gathered people in living rooms and tea parlors, persuading friends to stop wearing the hats.

In doing so, they turned private choices into a public movement.

"They weren't trying to win an argument," Gray said. "They were working to change behavior and to build shared responsibility."

That tradition of coalition building carried Audubon through the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Endangered Species Act, the fight against DDT and the recovery of such species as the bald eagle and the California condor.

The issues, tools and partners have changed over the decades, Gray said, but the core mission has not: Protect birds and the places they need because when birds thrive, people thrive, too.

Gray said one of Audubon's most important early lessons was that if your mission depends on one political moment, it will not survive many of them.

"Being nonpartisan is not a position or a posture," she said. "It's our strategy for durability."

Today Audubon organizes its work around flyways, because birds experience the world not as jurisdictions with boundaries but as connected landscapes. A single migratory bird can connect an Arctic coastline to a vineyard in the Snake River Valley to a wetland in Colombia to a coastal community in the Caribbean.

"That's why at Audubon we say we follow the birds," Gray said.

Those flights are leading to collaborations across the hemisphere. In Manitoba's Seal River Watershed, Audubon is partnering with indigenous leaders and local communities to protect nearly 50,000 square kilometers — an area roughly the distance from Sun Valley to Seattle — in one of the largest intact ecosystems on Earth.

In the American Southwest, Audubon worked with energy developers, government agencies and local communities on the SunZia Project, one of the largest clean energy projects in the world. Stakeholders came to the table with competing priorities — clean energy, wildlife corridors, economic opportunity — and stayed long enough to find solutions. The project is now delivering renewable energy across the region.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, Audubon's initiative is helping establish more than a hundred new protected areas in places like Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Ecuador's Chocó Forest, while supporting sustainable livelihoods and local economies.

And the work is hitting close to home. In Idaho, Gray said, conservation ranching is accelerating at a remarkable pace. In less than a year, more than 50,000 acres have entered Audubon's conservation ranching certification process, with ranchers, conservation organizations, state and federal agencies and local communities working together to keep working lands healthy, productive and resilient for the long term.

"Healthier lands support birds, they strengthen drought resilience, they store carbon, and they help sustain local communities," Gray said.

Collaboration rarely succeeds because people see the world the same way, she said. A farmer and a conservationist may not share the same views, but they both depend on healthy lands. A coastal resident and a local decision maker may disagree on how to prevent flooding, but they both depend on a shoreline that lasts.

"This work succeeds because people who see the world very differently still decide to work together toward shared outcomes," Gray said.

Conservation can feel daunting if you focus only on what is being lost, she added. But progress is real and visible with species returning, habitats being restored and communities coming together around shared stewardship.

"I see these moments everywhere," she said. "In Appalachia, across Latin America, and right here in Idaho."