The recipient of this year’s Owl Award is Myrna Pearman, a long-time member of RDRN who has contributed so much to the organization. Myrna was very, very young when she first got involved. She has the distinction of being the youngest President ever to hold office in RDRN. This was from 1989-1991. She sat on the Board for approximately 10 years.

Besides her years on the Board, Myrna has made other valuable contributions. During her time at the Kerry Wood Nature Centre in 1986, she initiated the Backyard Wildlife Habitat Program, which encouraged urban landowners to create habitat in their yards and gardens. This then morphed into NatureScape Alberta; Creating and caring for wildlife habitat at home. This book, which she co-authored with Dr. Ted Pike, was published in 2000. Most of the approximately 8000 books that have been sold were sold personally by Myrna who goes out to conferences and manages to sell boxes of the books at each conference. Since that time RDRN has also published her Mountain Bluebird Trail Monitoring Guide, another great selling book.

In the past, she was in charge of setting up our monthly speakers. She has returned to this job and has been bringing in excellent speakers for us.

In years past, she produced our newsletters . When another person was doing it and got overwhelmed, Myrna said, “I can do the newsletters again.” And a good thing that she did. Our newsletters have never been better. It has been suggested to us that we send our newsletters in somewhere to be judged because we’re sure they would win awards. They are such fine quality and all due to Myrna.

Other contributions made by Myrna:

• She was one of the members responsible for getting RDRN’s Habitat Steward program up and running in 1986-1987.
• She has been RDRN’s representative on the Ecotrust Board.
• In 1986-87 she and Cleve Werschler produced the Central Alberta Bird Checklist. That checklist was revamped by her (with a little help from Judy Boyd) in 2004.

And the list could go on and on.