North Fork Audubon Society will not change its name, citing membership’s opinions

The North Fork Audubon Society will not change its name to remove reference to John James Audubon, the namesake of the longtime American birding organization who was a slaveholder, racist and opponent of abolition, the group’s president said Tuesday.

Most of the group’s membership who shared their thoughts about the name change with the organization’s board favored keeping the reference to Audubon, who was the country’s dominant wildlife artist and naturalist, President Peggy Lauber said in an interview. The organization’s board of directors voted to keep the name in late February and announced the decision during last night’s general membership meeting, she said.

“Everyone was saying, ‘we need to stay focused on connecting people with nature,’” Lauber said. “And then we felt that that was vital to that mission, to keep the name.”

The National Audubon Society decided last March to retain the Audubon name after a year-long process of examining Audubon’s personal history. The national organization considered changing its name after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a racial reckoning across the country. Some local chapters of the Audubon Society, which are independent nonprofit organizations, decided they would change their names despite the decision.

The North Fork Audubon Society published an article about the issue and the history surrounding the Audubon namesake in its fall/winter newsletter and asked its membership to weigh in about the possibility of changing the organization’s name.

The organization has 194 members and roughly 20% of the membership responded to the board’s inquiry, Lauber said. “It was a significant portion of the membership and two-thirds of them voted to keep the name. And so accordingly, we decided that we would follow their wishes and keep the name,” she said. 

After the National Audubon Society announced it would keep the Audubon name, it pledged $25 million to expand “equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging” efforts in environmental conservation over five years. Lauber said the North Fork Audubon is continuing its own inclusion efforts, including having their signage and bird identification guides in both English and Spanish, and partnering with other organizations — such as the Southold-based CAST, which serves low-income families — to diversify its membership and “be responsive to the demographics of our area.”  

“We are just trying to be as inclusive as possible going forward,” Lauber said.

Although Audubon’s contributions to “ornithology, art, and culture are enormous,” he was also “a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day,” the National Audubon Society acknowledges in a profile of Audubon on its website. Audubon enslaved Black people, wrote critically about emancipation, and committed academic fraud and plagiarism, according to the profile.

Audubon was not the founder of the birding organization that bears his name. The first Audubon Society was founded in 1896 — 45 years after Audubon’s death — by two Boston socialites, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall, in opposition to the hunting and killing of birds for use of their feathers in clothing, according to North Fork Audubon Board Member Ellen Birenbaum, who wrote the newsletter article. 

Lauber said it’s important for the organization to publicize the history of Hemenway and Hall going forward. The original organization’s founders chose Audubon because of his contributions to wildlife art and history, according to the Audubon Society.