Champion of Owls Award
Alan Sieradzki, United Kingdom

Alan Sieradzki is a British naturalist who has spent 50 years working in all aspects of owl study. In the early 1970’s, under the auspices of his local wildlife trust, Sieradzki was involved with regional initiatives to encourage farmers and landowners to allow Barn Owl nest boxes to be erected and monitored on their property. He also organized and led owl prowls and pellet hunts for trust members, plus operated a raptor rehabilitation unit with funding from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).
 
During the 1970’s and into the 1980’s he was in demand as a speaker in the northwest of England for his illustrated talks on owls, culminating in being invited to be a guest speaker at the prestigious Preston Society (formerly the Preston Scientific Society, founded in 1876). A number of the images he created for his illustrated talks are still being used in publications around the world today.
 
During this period, Sieradzki also helped launch a new environmental education initiative: WATCH (which later became the nation-wide non-profit organization Watch Trust for Environmental Education). For a short period he headed WATCH in the northwest of England.
 
By the 1990’s, Sieradzki moved from working in woodland and moorland into libraries and museums as he delved into the more foundational aspects of owl study, conservation, morphology, physiology and, most notably, owl taxonomy. Today he is still a contributor to the Strigiformes (owls) section of The Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World.
 
In 2004 David H. Johnson invited Sieradzki to assist in putting together an accurate taxonomic listing of the world’s owls for the newly created Global Owl Project website. This quickly turned into a much larger project to track down and acquire clean copies of every single published original owl species description to be used for future taxonomic research. Sieradzki headed the project, which many knowledgeable voices doubted could be done. It was done. In 2007, the Global Owl Project produced a DVD-ROM, Original literature describing the entire Order of Strigiformes (extant and fossil Genera, species and subspecies) 1758-2007, containing pdf copies of 671 original extant owl descriptions and 103 original extinct and fossil owl descriptions dating from 1758 to 2007. This was, and still is, the only time that the original descriptions of an entire avian order have been brought together in a single collection.
 
Since 2007, Sieradzki has continued to work closely with Johnson and the Global Owl Project, most recently collaborating with Bruce Marcot on a project about owls in folklore and culture. Sieradzki also continues to work with Richard J. Clark and Tracy L. Fleming on updating Clark’s Working Bibliography of Owls of the World from 1978, while also regularly using his network of databases and contacts to assist authors and researchers around the world in gathering reference material.  
 
Sieradzki has authored and co-authored over 30 owl related papers and book chapters and continues to do so to this day. His diverse work encompasses owls around the world and includes taxonomy, diet, extinct species, impacts of climate change, and other topics. Some of his favorite publications include his Intech 2023 book chapter Designed for Darkness: The Unique Physiology and Anatomy of Owls, which is functionally an updated version of his illustrated talks from the 1970’s, and his 2023 Kauzbrief article Eulenmumien im Alten Ägypten (Owl Mummies in Ancient Egypt).

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Photo by Jean-Pierre Geusens

Special Achievement Award
Marjon Savelsberg, The Netherlands

​When Marjon Savelsberg was training to be a classical musician at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in Maastricht, The Netherlands, she never dreamed that one day her musical aptitude would lead her to become the world authority on Eurasian Eagle Owl vocalizations.
 
Savelsberg loved nature from the time she was a little girl, playing outside as much as she could. She also loved music, and chose that as her career path. When health issues derailed her career plans and doctors offered little hope, Marjon found owl cams. She also discovered that her musically trained ear was exceptionally well-suited to help with the International Owl Center’s vocal study on Great Horned Owls, which was further helped by the seven-hour time difference between Minnesota and The Netherlands so she was awake when the owls were.
 
Her curiosity and intellect drove her to learn how to analyze sound files herself, and eventually to look for the wild Eurasian Eagle Owls she had heard lived in a quarry near Maastricht. After seeing her multiple times, the local conservation officer informed the curious lady on a mobility scooter that a permit was needed to be there after dark, and soon he became part of Savelsberg’s support team to study the owls there.
 
Using a growing number of recorders and near-daily observations of the owls in the field, Savelsberg found more pairs of owls than anyone ever suspected lived in the area. She found she could identify individual birds by their calls, worked to decipher their full spectrum of vocalizations and their meanings, detected mate replacement, found juveniles mooching food from adults that were not their own parents, and is providing evidence that suggests non-native raccoons are killing an alarming number of just-fledged Eurasian Eagle Owls.
 
Savelsberg has presented her research at about 20 conferences and symposia in The Netherlands, Belgium and the United States and co-authored a paper on American Barn Owls in Minnesota. Other researchers and universities ask for her acoustic expertise in studying Tawny Owls, Little Owls, garden dormice, and other species, including training students how to conduct bioacoustic research.
 
Natuurmonumenten, a nature preservation organization that manages much of the property where Savelsberg does her research, consults with her about habitat management and potential disturbance related to owls, and requires film crews aiming to shoot video of the owls to work with her. Her work has been featured on television, radio, newspapers and in Jennifer Ackerman’s New York Times bestselling book “What an Owl Knows.” After Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl was cut loose from his enclosure in the Central Park Zoo, Savelsberg was consulted by major media and quoted in the New York Times, The Smithsonian, and other global media outlets. She also worked with a film crew creating a full-length film about Flaco.
 
Although she has only been working with owls for 15 years so far and operates on a mobility scooter, she spends roughly 200 days per year in the field and works on owl vocalizations at least 300 days a year. Her work is all done as a volunteer, running on sheer passion, skill, donated equipment and a musically trained ear. 

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Photo by Jacqueline Emery

Lady Gray'l Award
Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl, New York, USA

​Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl hatched in captivity in 2010 and began his educational career at the Central Park Zoo the same year. On February 2, 2023, vandals cut him out of his enclosure. Staff were not able to recapture Flaco and he lived free in New York City, mostly in or near Central Park, until his death from anticoagulant rodenticide poisoning and pigeon herpesvirus a year later on February 23, 2024.
 
As Flaco learned to hunt and survive on his own, birders and a huge number of non-birders followed his every move on social media, traditional media, and in person. He taught the world about the power of instinct and adaptation and what it takes to be an owl. To a lesser degree he prompted discussion about captive owl housing, non-native apex predators, imprinting, and many ethical discussions. His death brought an enormous amount of publicity to the problems of anticoagulant rodenticides and window strikes.
 
Flaco became a symbol of freedom to New Yorkers and people all over the country and world, and he likely received more media coverage than any other owl in history. His ability to inspire people to take an interest in wildlife cannot be overstated.
 
He was featured in a tremendous amount of media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, Fortune, People, Rolling Stone, Audubon, CNN, NPR, Inside Edition, Good Morning America, plus The Guardian and The Independent in the UK, and the CBC in Canada. He became the subject of at least eight books and a feature length documentary about him will premiere on HBO this year. The New York Historical had a special exhibition about him and is archiving items from his memorial. It would likely not be an overestimation to say that more than 100 million people learned about Flaco.
 
Flaco’s death significantly raised awareness about anticoagulant rodenticide poisoning and other hazards birds face in urban environments, such as window collisions. Better yet, it spurred action and legislation. A state bird safe buildings law was renamed the “FLACO Act.” Three laws were introduced in his honor in New York City. The first one, which passed unanimously, established a pilot program to study the use of rat contraceptives as an alternative to rodenticides. The second would require private buildings to turn off unnecessary lights at night, and the third would require private buildings to replace reflective glass windows by 2030. Flaco also inspired multiple grassroots efforts to protect wildlife from anticoagulant rodenticides.