Hoping to grow attention for the program “Inviting Birds to Your Backyard,” master gardener Herb Lewis will speak Saturday, Sept, 21, in Athens.
Lewis’s passion, which has claimed nationwide attention, is helping to create backyard bird sanctuaries. His talk is 10 a.m. at the Limestone County Extension Building, 1109 W. Market Street, Athens. The program, sponsored by Limestone County Master Gardeners, is free and open to the public.
Since retiring from the defense industry in 2004, Lewis has focused his personal hobbies of gardening, landscaping and birding into a passion of creating a backyard wildlife habitat to attract birds. His property is certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.
The Lewis backyard was featured in the October 2006 issue of “Alabama Gardener” magazine, included in the 2007 Huntsville Garden tour sponsored by the Huntsville Botanical Garden and has been the basis for numerous workshops and presentations during the past 10 years. The presentation “Inviting Birds to Your Backyard” will feature many photos of this award-winning botanical wonderland.
In 2013, Lewis led the development and design for a local birding trail map in Madison County sponsored by the Huntsville/Madison County Convention and Visitors Bureau. He assisted the Huntsville Botanical Garden in developing the Lewis Birding Trail within the Garden. Lewis and his wife travel extensively and have expanded bird watching interests from the backyard to many locations throughout the U.S. and foreign countries.
Lewis has taught workshops at the Huntsville Botanical Garden, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Alabama Huntsville and LearningQUEST. He has given numerous presentations and tours to groups across North Alabama as well as the Audubon societies in Birmingham, Alabama, and Rockland, New York.
Lewis is an Honorary Master Gardener and serves as an instructor teaching the techniques of backyard habitat development to the Master Gardener training classes for Limestone, Madison and Morgan Counties.