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From Birds to Gardens, Sally Brockett is Educating North Haven

In her time as a birdwatcher, Sally Brockett has seen 493 different bird species - and that’s only North American birds. In February, she’ll bring her knowledge to the upcoming presentation the “Amazing Abilities of Birds.”

Sally’s love of wildlife isn’t just for the birds; it extends to gardening as well. She’s been the president of the Daytime Gardeners of North Haven since 2016 and a member since 2011.

“It’s a small club and we meet during the daytime,” says Sally. “Our mission is to involve the community in learning and motivating them to have interest in gardening and conserving the environment.”

The group has been active around town installing several xeriscape gardens made up of native plants that require little to no supplemental watering. But Sally says one of their most important duties is educating youth about the importance of gardening.

“That’s how you develop the future,” Sally says.

The club has run several programs for local girl scout troops. Currently, the group is awaiting the results of a woodsy owl poster contest advocating for ecological preservation that they ran with a local Brownie troop. They’ve also run programs teaching kids about the growth of plant life.

“We focus on making it a learning experience. Not just plant a seed but understand the growth of the seed and what it needs to grow,” she says.

After a lesson about seed growth, the kids grew bean plants in plastic cups so they could watch and record the development of the root system and sprout development.

Their work last year earned them a Luckner Youth Award for outstanding work with a youth group based on all of the projects that they’ve done.

Currently, the club hosts 14 members but is always looking for more to join. She says her husband, Walter, brings a great deal of help to the club. He makes many of the kits that participants of all ages build during the Daytime Gardeners’ events. Among those kits, he made frames for small succulent gardens and kits for bird houses and mason bee houses which were then assembled by the club and members of the public.

Sally’s love of birding and wildlife is one she enjoys sharing wiht the public. Over the years, she has given several presentations on wildlife to her club and others throughout the state. Her latest will be presented before the North Haven Gardener’s Club on Thursday, Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the North Haven Congregational Church.

The presentation will contain information Sally learned from her own birding experiences, a hobby she took up in 1976.

“We don’t think about some of the things that birds can do,” Sally says. “A lot of the times you don’t know a lot of the amazing things that birds can do.”

One of those “amazing things,” Sally says, is the incredible memories of chickadees.

“They hide [seeds] and then they remember where they’ve put it for when they need to eat during the winter,” Sally says. “They will hide half a million seeds...over a large area.”

She also plans to go over migration patterns and how some species know to get to their annual migration point, seemingly without the guidance of adult birds.

“Birds just fascinate me,” Sally says. “When you are really interested in birds, you like to keep a list of all the birds that you’ve seen.”

Sally adds to her list whenever possible. When she travels, she finds a way to see new birds. On a trip to Costa Rica for work, she spent four extra days and added 90 additional birds to her list.

When she and Walter are away on vacation, they have less interest in comfort than they do in catching sight of new birds. They joined a birding tour guide on a trip to Alaska who took them through the tundra to see rare bird species.

“We basically spent all day, every day [birding],” Sally says, “and all day in Alaska is a long day in the summer because the sun doesn’t set.”

Hiking and birding makes for a rigorous vacation. The Alaskan tundra is muddy in the summer and the path is riddled with wet mounds of grass.

“You step on them and they move. It’s not stable. It’s kind of like walking on marshmallows through the tundra in June,” she says. “Just the physical activity of getting out there and going a mile or two can be challenging.”

But Sally doesn’t have to go far to catch sight of wildlife. She keeps a pair of binoculars in one room of her home in North Haven to observe the blue bird houses Sally has set up in her backyard.