Jillian Bell grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, and has been fascinated with the natural world since she was a child and noticed flowers growing through the cracks of a sidewalk. Although she initially studied theater and criminal justice in college, she later returned to school for a master’s program in environmental studies with a concentration in environmental education. She works for Audubon Connecticut, as the Bird Friendly Communities Program Associate, where she coordinates the Urban Oases and Schoolyard Habitat Program, helping to create and enhance native plant communities in urban and suburban areas. She also serves as a council member on the Connecticut Urban Forest Council. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut, with her husband, Steve and their 1-year-old son, Henry.
My Grand-Aunt Louise used to take me for walks when I was little. One of my first memories of nature is of walking down the sidewalk and seeing these beautiful pinkish-purple flowers. They were a type of evening primrose and they’d grow up in between the cracks of the sidewalk. I used to love seeing those flowers and I’d always want to take one to give to my mom. We would count how many we’d find on our walk.
I went to elementary school in downtown Birmingham. At my school, we got to go outside for playtime, but it was all cement. We had a gravel playground, so you were either in the gravel or on the cement. There wasn’t one plant on our schoolground. We did have a dogwood tree that grew on the other side of the brick wall, so you could see the top of that.
I studied theater and criminal justice in college, and I’ve since spent a lot of time thinking about how these things intersect. I think it all stemmed from my love of the human experience and the things that make us human. With theater, I got to experience life as these characters that I was playing. With criminal justice, I was thinking about the experience of people who maybe don’t have a voice or the words that they need to defend themselves, and I was considering becoming a defense attorney.
I got burnt out doing theater. So I thought, what else do I love? I’ve always been into biology and the environment. I have to give credit to my high school biology teacher, Mrs. Sandra McKell. I was in the Biology Club, and she organized these awesome trips for us to go and visit Dauphin Island, which is down in the Gulf. We would spend a week there and get to do these awesome experiments and get hands-on experience. We were scientists for the week. It was really, really cool, and I wanted more.
I went back to school and took some undergraduate biology classes. I wound up also taking an environmental studies class as an elective. Something in me just lit up. My teacher at the time noticed I was teaching my classmates and helping explain things to them, and asked if I had ever thought about going into environmental education. I honestly didn’t even know that that was a job. I started looking into the many different ways people can be environmental educators, and I decided to study environmental education at Antioch University New England, in Keene, New Hampshire.
I’ve worked with Audubon since 2016 and now coordinate the Urban Oases and Schoolyard Habitat Projects within the Bird Friendly Communities Program. A lot of the work I do is in urban and suburban areas. We believe that what is good for birds is also good for people. We want to make our communities more friendly for birds, with the understanding that doing so will also make the community better for people.
My work is very varied. We provide professional development workshops for teachers to help get them more comfortable taking their students outside for outdoor learning. We have a workshop where we do onsite co-teaching. We’ll go to their school and walk around the school grounds with them and point out different natural features that are there that could be used to study eastern tiger swallowtail, for instance. Whatever the class is studying, we will try to figure out how to integrate nature into their curriculum and how to align it so that it’s seamless for teachers.
We also have a mini-grant program where we will help guide schools through the creation or improvement of habitat on their school grounds with native plants. All of the projects I have done have been creating new outdoor spaces. A handful of our schools didn’t have any green space. At one school we were able to create habitat in a courtyard with raised beds for native plants. Another school wanted to see a rainbow of color when they looked outside, so they made it a point to include native plants from each of these different color groups.
We also work with community groups to create what we call urban oases. Urban oases are usually in parks, and often created in conjunction with park “friends” groups or land trusts. The project depends on the size of the space. I’ve found that our urban oases groups wind up planting more trees than our school groups do, and that’s mainly in response to the space they’re planting. I’ve always loved plants. I’ve fallen more in love with plants through my job. I’ve definitely fallen more in love with birds, too. But plants are amazing, because they support the caterpillars and the birds and they clean the air.
People in general, especially in urban and suburban settings, have gotten away from nature in some ways. We don’t readily get to see how things are connected. We’re so busy. Our lives are forcing us to just go-go-go. My role is to say, “Hey, these are the connections that are there. This is how everything is linked.” And that helps people see that they can have, for instance, a plant with red flowers that is beautiful and will also support this caterpillar which supports that bird. The majority of my emails are from people who have a plant in their yard and want to replace it with something that is a native plant to support their local wildlife.
We work mainly with the teachers, but I also get to go in and work with students. The kids love learning about nature and soak it up and get so excited. I have heard so many stories about the fox that they saw at their grandma’s house, or the worm that they saw when they went outside in the rain the other day. No matter where you live, even if you live in the most desolate area of an urban environment, there is some nature around you, and people will see it, especially little kids. And they get excited about it, because they think, “Hey, I’ve got nature, too.” They’re always shocked when they find out that this is what I do for work – that I get paid to go outside.
At one school in Stamford, Connecticut, there was a little boy named Benjamin in third grade. We were talking about habitat, and the kids were coming up with their own definition as a class of what habitat was. And Benjamin was like, “I’m just going to stop you. We don’t have habitat here.” By the end the lesson, he was like “Oh my gosh, we’ve got habitat. We have shelter, and we’ve got food, and we have water! I was wrong, we do have habitat, and I just didn’t know it!” He was so excited about it. You get to see their eyes open up to something new, even though it’s something that’s always been there.
Also, I’ve noticed behavioral changes in the students, and teachers have commented to us that they’ve noticed behavioral changes in the students. It’s amazing the amount of focus they have to make observations or go find evidence of wildlife. They are into it. They work together on these projects. It’s beautiful to see. The kids can share out loud in front of the class or draw a picture of what they’re seeing outside or help do research by looking in the field guide – there’s something for everybody. Everybody is fully engaged. As a class, they feel very proud of the work that they’ve done.
One of my favorite things about my job, in addition to being able to show kids that you can have a career in the environmental world, is being able to do that for people who live in urban environments and also for people who don’t think that the environment is for them. That’s been really special for me, because I didn’t see anybody growing up that looked like me that did something in the environmental world. Being able to be that representation is really important for me.
I love kayaking with my husband, and going for hikes. When we get out in nature and go for a hike in the forest, it just brings our stress levels down. It’s just a deeper exhale. We’re able to have these lovely conversations and just connect with each other. It’s a really important time for us to connect. We lost our first son, whose name is Chip. I used to hike while I was pregnant with Chip, and when I hike, I feel connected to him. For his birthday every year, in November, we go for a hike in his memory. This year we brought our second son, Henry, on that hike, which was really special.
Henry was born in March last year. He loves trees. I know people think that I’m crazy by saying that my son loves trees, but if he was ever having a fussy day as a little baby, I would step outside onto our deck, and he would immediately stop crying and stare at the cherry tree. I called it the reset button. When we go for walks, I’ll stop and have him look at the trees, and he’ll just grin and be mesmerized by them. We just moved into a new house about a year and a half ago and have been trying to convert our yard into a lovely native plant sanctuary. And he enjoys looking at those plants. But when he sees the trees, he is just wowed.
East Rock Park in New Haven is a favorite place for us to go. It’s close, about a 10-minute walk, and I think that accessibility is huge. Having accessible nature is very important. We can walk there, we don’t need to take the car or even a bike, and that’s been huge and important for us as new parents. It’s also an important birding area. During the spring migration, it is bonkers in this park, both in terms of bird numbers, but also in terms of people numbers. People go to East Rock to see the birds. It’s like a big magnet on their migration, where they can stop and refuel.
Birds have these long migratory routes that they’re taking. If we were taking a long car ride somewhere, we need to have rest stops. They need that too. Insects and birds don’t always recognize plants as food if it’s not species they’ve co evolved with, so even if you have plants in your yard, if they’re not native, it’s essentially a food desert. That’s why native plants are so important.
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