Mike Brady, new BdA Refuge Manager, is seen here assisting the California condor recovery efforts at Hopper Mountain NWR in California.
I feel so lucky to have found a career that allowed me to hone my boyhood fascination of wildlife observation and catching creatures, heading into my thirtieth year with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. My career has taken me to Maryland, Virginia, California (twice), Florida, Massachusetts, Alaska (twice), and now New Mexico. There have been so many people who helped me get to where I am today, but I owe my start to my parents, John and Ann Brady. They were both schoolteachers, who allowed me to explore and observe the natural world just north of Boston, Massachusetts. I fondly remember my parents getting me a subscription to Ranger Rick, and they even let me adhere the Ranger Rick club sticker on the window of our car. They also provided me with foundational books like My Side of the Mountain, Walden and The Sea Around Us, which became the foundation of who I am, and bought me a havahart trap and a beach siene, which allowed me to see animals and creatures up close.
My first position in the wildlife field was in 1986 working for Massachusetts Audubon at Wellfleet Bay, where I was paid to catch, mark and track Northern diamondback terrapins on Cape Cod. This is also where I met my wife Stephanie. We both started our Service careers at Blackwater NWR on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. I got my start as a Tractor Operator/Firefighter in 1994 and we both have been zig-zagging across the United Sates since then.
Common and Roseate terns at Monomoy NWR in Massachusetts.
We have a son, Dylan, who also participated in most of our early adventures, but now lives in Missoula, Montana. Dylan checked off his fiftieth state by traveling to Alaska for the first time in 2009, when I was the Refuge Deputy at Alaska Peninsula and Becharof in King Salmon, Alaska. Along the way, he stopped at both Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota to visit the boyhood homes of his namesake, Bob Dylan.
Tundra swan at Alaska Peninsula/Becharof NWR in Alaska.
My most recent duty station was Kodiak NWR, where I managed two million acres in the Gulf of Alaska. Kodiak is a very passively managed refuge, mainly established for brown bears, salmon and coastal water birds. My current position as Refuge Manager at Bosque del Apache NWR is the opposite, with over 57,000 acres which are intensively managed for migrating and wintering birds. This position has allowed me to come full circle in my career and puts me back on an ag tractor.
Boreal owl at Kodiak NWR in Alaska.
I have been able to live in so many unique places and have had the fortune to work in such a variety of habitats and see so many new species. I look back fondly on the people I have met along the way and I look forward to meeting new folks and hearing their stories during my time at Bosque del Apache. I’m looking forward to meeting folks, so please stop by and say hello – I have an open-door policy!
My sense of exploration still challenges and compels me to want to see what is just around the next corner of the next corner. In many ways, fortunately, I still have the vision of a child with an indestructible sense of wonder…and to think this all started with a Ranger Rick sticker and havahart trap!
In my free time, I enjoy traveling, live music, backpacking, birdwatching and gardening. I am a fan of the Boston Bruins, the Red Sox and Grand Sumo.
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” –Rachel Carson