There’s something new and beautiful down at Inlet Pond County Park in Greenport. Just to the east of the Red House, a nature center that serves as the headquarters for North Fork Audubon, is a delightful new garden, protected from deer, designed to provide food for migrating birds and a waystation for weary people who need a dose of nature to go on with their day.
Lovers of birds and native gardens came together Saturday, Oct. 11 to honor the legacy of longtime North Fork Audubon board member Rick Kedenburg, who was instrumental in financing and launching the new “Berries for Birds” garden, up until his death in 2023.
“When I joined the board, 14 years ago, Rick and Linda, his wife, were already longtime board members — none of us can remember how long they’d been involved, but a long time,” said current North Fork Audubon President Peggy Lauber at the dedication ceremony.
She recounted one of her earliest experiences with Rick and Linda, at a night hike looking for owls at the Jack Levin (Arshamamoque) Preserve on Chapel Lane.
“Right at the entrance, there were birds chipping back and forth, and Linda said ‘that’s the cardinals calling to each other. They call each other in the evenings, just to make sure everybody’s ok,'” said Ms. Lauber. “We went up to the tower and were hoping to hear or see great horned owls. Rick did this beautiful great horned owl imitation and an owl answered right back, like they were waiting for us. I was hooked. Rick was my mentor for so many years.”
Mr. Kedenburg’s niece, Kim Springston, traveled from Nassau County to the celebration.
“We miss him. He was the gentle giant of our family,” she said. “Rick used to work on Wall Street, and we all thought ‘what are you doing there? It’s not the environment for a gentle man, giving and kind like you.'”
“When we were young, Uncle Rick was really involved with our lives, and I said ‘you need to do something that’s communing with nature, something calming, something that will touch your soul,'” she told the crowd gathered for the dedication. “I said ‘you should come to the Audubon Society in Oyster Bay.’… That was 1995, and that was how he got his start with the Audubon Society. From there, he met Aunt Linda and was a wildlife rehabilitator. He just had a love of nature. This is his legacy. I’m very happy for him.”
“There’s just no one who cared more deeply about birds and their place in the framework of the natural world than Rick,” said Ms. Lauber. “When he knew that he had cancer, he told me he wanted to make a donation to us.”
Around the same time, North Fork Audubon Board Member Ellen Birenbaum was beginning to raise awareness of the importance of native plants in providing food for birds, particularly while they migrate, drawing on the work of naturalist Doug Tallamy, who encourages people to build their own Homegrown National Parks in their backyards, and Scott Weidensaul, author in 2021 of “A World on the Wing,” which recounted the loss of about three billion migratory birds over the previous decade, “primarily due to habitat loss.”
“How can we preserve these birds? The answer is simple — plant berry-producing trees to help refuel migrating birds at stopover sites during the fall migration,” said Ms. Birenbaum at the dedication. “Berries for Birds is about increasing the number of native berry-producing trees and shrubs on the North Fork, a vital stopover location along the Atlantic Flyway — the major north-south route for migrating birds.”
North Fork Audubon’s website includes a video of Ms. Birenbaum’s presentation on how to provide food for birds in your backyard, and the chapter also sells many of the recommended plant varieties at its spring and fall native plant sales.
North Fork Audubon Board Member and landscape designer Robin Simmen oversaw the construction of the garden, partnering with ReWild Long Island’s North Fork Chapter, which provided about 2/3 of the native plants in the garden, and with Edgar Luna of K. Luna Fences & Decks Corp, who built the innovative deer fencing to protect the garden.
“We all care about birds, and we all care about Rick,” she said. “I knew Rick the last five or six years of his life. He was a fierce lover of nature. He fiercely wanted other people to appreciate what he experienced. He walked the walk. He didn’t just talk the talk.”
“We shared a lot in terms of grief,” she added. “His wife, Linda, had died and my husband had died, and I remember walking on a bird walk with him and crying. He was somebody I could do that with. So I had a very strong sense of fellowship with him, and also recovery from that process. When your world turns upside down, what do you do? You do what you can do, and he was very much a can-do person.”
Ms. Simmen said the site of the Berries for Birds garden had previously been an attempt at a pollinator garden, anchored by butterfly weed, that had become overgrown with mugwort and was “just a hot mess.”
Three years ago, North Fork Audubon’s landscape committee decided to transform the areas into a Berries for Birds garden. The cleared the land in 2022, planting cover crops of oats to choke out the weed seeds and build up the health of the soil. Mr. Luna joined the effort in 2023, building an eight-foot high wood and cable deer fence around three sides of the garden, and two four-foot fences, five feet apart, on the front side of the garden.
“The deer, psychologically will not jump fences that are five feet apart at that low height,” said Ms. Simmen.
With a team from ReWild, North Fork Audubon planted the garden in the fall of 2024, with plants including honeysuckle, red chokeberry, viburnum, beach plum, Virginia creeper and American wisteria vines, cardinal flower and black-eyed Susans. Bushes that require both male and female plants to produce berries have been assured a mate.
The garden is anchored by a sweetbay magnolia tree, “a tall, columnar semi-evergreen that has red fruits that persist throughout the winter,” said Ms. Simmen.
“It was a great and joyful occasion,” she said of the planting day. “We’re the only friend that these diminishing species have left. We have to change the choices that we’re making about how we landscape our land to give them what they need.”
Though the garden is fenced, a welcoming gate bearing a plaque honoring Mr. Kedenburg reminds humans that the barrier is just to keep out deer — this is a sanctuary for people as well as birds, with café tables and chairs inviting people to stay and watch and listen.
“I wanted people to be able to go in and hang out, because that’s the way Rick experienced birds,” said Ms. Simmen. “We wanted a place where people could feel like it’s an adult fort. Go in, bring your lunch, bring your coffee. Hang out there with your friends. It’s a public space, where you can also sit and be really quiet. I sit there myself and the birds just start flying in. It’s about the birds feeling safe and getting what they need, and for us to have that experience of birdsong.”
Many of the birds that breed on the North Fork migrate to Central or South America, and Ms. Lauber said Mr. Kedenburg was not just thinking about the North Fork when he made his bequest.
“We all worry about habitat loss here on the North Fork, but we don’t think about the fact that these birds travel to countries that are being devastated by narco-deforestation and illegal cattle ranching,” she said. “We’re exploring developing partnerships with organizations in Central America, to raise awareness among the indigenous people and young people of the plight of the birds, and to work together to protect their precious and very threatened habitat.”
Ms. Lauber said the project has a mascot, the Baltimore oriole, a gorgeous, easily identified bird that migrates from the North Fork to Central America.
“It’s a long-term project we’re researching, thanks to Rick, who provided the seed money,” she said. “We feel confident, if we can find an organization to work together with, that it’s a relationship that’s going to last for years. This is just the beginning.”
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