by Edge Wade
Few people, perhaps none, have had as much impact on the successful operations of state ornithological and other nature-related organizations in recent years as Ann Johnson of Indianola, IA. With her death March 23,2026 at age 76, the Missouri Birding Society, including the sister organizations of Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, and many more NGO’s including the Missouri River Bird Observatory—approximately 125 organizations, overall, lost a dynamic champion of natural history and a major facilitator in their delivery of services and communications with membership and the public.
In Ann’s career with the Iowa Department of Social Services, she became the intermediary between the IT department and field staff, taking classes and then self-teaching coding skills to improve communications between them.
Ann was a lifelong birder. In 1995, as an active member, she brought those skills to the Iowa Ornithologists’ Union to develop a basic, static website that required her input for updating. In 2000, she became secretary of the Iowa Rare Birds Records Committee and moved committee operations from a paper, photocopy, and mail system to a transactional on-line process. This ability to work through a web browser became the model for other activities and the IOU site was expanded to include membership management, meeting registration, and even board of directors motions and discussions between official meetings.
Word of her skills spread as birders noted the quality and breadth of the IOU website. She answered several pleas for website help before forming ajEndeavors, LLC, her small web development company in 2009, before retiring from her state job in 2010. ASM (now MBS) was one of the first to seek Ann’s help.
In 2002, Mike Beck, a past president, took on the job of creating the first version of the ASM website. In 2003, Patrick Harrison became editor of The Bluebird and assumed the duties of webmaster. Consulting with Ann, Patrick created the first ASM interactive version and, when in late 2005, ASM entered into the agreement with the Missouri Department of Conservation to conduct bird surveys in the program that came to be known as CACHE, Patrick designed the first-in-the-nation statewide bird occurrence database (pre-eBird) with on-line entry directly by the observers, going live in February, 2007.
The Missouri Bird Records Committee MBRC was starting to evaluate the idea of putting the documentation process on line in 2005. MRBC Secretary Bill Rowe began corresponding with Ann to tap into her experience as the Iowa records committee secretary and her web design for the IOU site. The product of Ann and Bill’s collaboration with help from Patrick went live in December 2007. That began 19 years of work back and forth, debugging the system and (according to Bill) debugging the secretary, as well.
“I’m sorry I never met Ann, but she was a great correspondent, always prompt to reply to my questions, always keenly interested making things work properly, and always candid, with replies ranging from “Oops…” to “Not sure what’s going on…get back to you tomorrow” to a patient explanation (perhaps for the third time) of what I was supposed to do at my end to make something happen. No matter what the problem was, I knew I could count on her to get on it right away and to fix it—and I always appreciated her sense of humor. I will miss her.”— Bill Rowe
By late 2008 the complexity of the CACHE/SPARKS concept had grown immensely, and both the ASM and IOU websites had been hacked. Patrick contacted Ann and discussed what she was going to do about the hack. She was beginning to convert her websites to a different format. Patrick asked her about converting the ASM site at the same time, as well as addressing the increased complexity of the CACHE/SPARKS system. That began the collaboration of code writing for the new version of the website, a working acquaintance that continued in Patick’s tenure as webmaster into 2017, and developed into a personal friendship with shared birding experiences.
“Ann acted as a generous and giving person throughout our association. She was more than a mentor to me. She was a springboard from which new ideas were created and improvements to our website took place.”— Patrick Harrison
Kevin Wehner became ASM/MBS webmaster in 2017. During Kevin’s time in the job, Ann totally re-built the website to modernize it and make it mobile device friendly. It was her idea to use MailChimp for the membership renewal notices.
“Ann was always very quick to respond to requests to fix bugs and/or make enhancements to the website.”— Kevin Wehner
In my role as ASM/MBS Conservation Partnership Coordinator during nearly 20 years working with Ann, I hardly missed a week communicating with her–most of it via emails beginning with, “How do I…” or “Where is x on the website?” Alas, some of the same questions were posed more times than I’d like to admit. She never chided or commented on the limitations of my ability or memory. Again and again, she would walk me through the process with kindness and humor.
When the birding site guide series was added as a deliverable in the CACHE/SPARKS agreements, Ann added that section to the website and we worked to make it input and user friendly.
As a component of the SPARKS agreement ASM/MBS took on the responsibility to maintain and update the bird checklists for every Missouri state park hosted on our website. Ann created that feature and the required links to make them available on the individual park websites.
It took a while (years), but Ann finally convinced the folks at Cornell that the CACHE/SPARKS data could be transferred into eBird. With minimal help from me, she identified and connected all C/S contributors to the sites, converted entries to eBird format, and transferred the data into the eBird dataset. This effort put Missouri among the top states for eBird data.
Bird identification workshops have often been included as elements of our obligations within CACHE/SPARKS. We began delivering some on-line via Zoom, especially as a response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Ann made the recorded sessions available on our website.
In recent years, she was quick to see the potential of the privately developed Birding Hotspots website, connected it to the MBS website, and with Kevin Wehner and me, served as editor, as she did for her home state, Iowa. [The Hotspots website as of 2026 has been absorbed by eBird, largely because of the value of the site as demonstrated by Ann and various webmasters].
In her overview of ajEndeavors, Ann listed three financial goals in working with non-profits:
- Assure that the organization gets a quality product for their money. In this vein, I assume all risk except for hosting costs
- The application should be self-sustaining and manageable by members of the organization with little to no on-going development costs
- To be at least minimally compensated for my time for my birding travel fund.
The members of the Missouri Birding Society, and by extension, all birders of Missouri will continue to benefit from Ann’s work, done with very modest compensation for her considerable skills and time.
And, I, along with the many people she mentored and shared birding adventures with will miss Ann Johnson’s empathy, humor, and reassuring presence.