There was just enough woods behind Phil Brown’s Staten Island childhood home to get him interested in nature.
He’d climb trees, catch frogs and snakes – the sort of activities that a lot of kids enjoy when given the freedom to roam around in the outdoors. But soon his interest gravitated toward birds, finding and photographing any and all he could lay his eyes on.
When Brown was seven, his brother got him his first birding book and “I’d read that from book cover to cover,” he said. He still remembers the bird on the cover, a Painted Bunting, which Brown described as “a whole bunch of paint got together to make a bird.”
It was around that time where a family trip to Florida truly opened his eyes to the wonders of birds and how unique and special each species was.
His parents noticed his interest and did everything they could to foster and further his passion. They helped him join a birding club where he was “the youngest person by 50 or 60 years,” Brown said.
He went on outings and learned how to identify new species and his interest only grew from there. Brown said there was one club member that took a special interest in his young curiosity.
But it was something he kept to himself, as he didn’t feel it was exactly the coolest thing to share with friends that he liked to hang out with adults and look for birds.
“Birding kind of became my secret life,” Brown said.
Even though it was something that Brown didn’t share with many, it was an interest that grew with each species identified – and it continues to this day.
At 39 years old, Brown can still be found most days wandering through the woods with his eyes and ears trained on every little sight and sound in search of what’s happening around him. The only difference from his childhood days is that passion for birding and the great outdoors became a career where he gets paid to immerse himself in the natural world.
“I feel it’s been focused for a long time, knowing what I wanted to do for my life,” Brown said.
He began his career with the NH Audubon in 2004 as sanctuaries manager, overseeing 8,000 acres of land all across the state. His job has morphed over the years as he is now the director of land management. But even with the changes in responsibilities, it still allows Brown to do thing things he loves most – connect people with the outdoors.
Brown does a lot of environmental education through the Audubon, leading field trips and nature tours, while offering an expertise in managing lands so they can be occupied and preserved for both the wildlife that roam free and the people with a passion to enjoy them.
“Every day you can learn something knew – even walking in the same patch of woods,” Brown said.
For the last 10 years, Brown has served as a hawk watch coordinator, the first eight years within his role at the NH Audubon and the last two with the Harris Center through a partnership between the two organizations.
He’s in charge of the research and education endeavor on Pack Monadnock during the annual fall migration, where around 5,000 people gravitate to the rocky area with views for miles upon miles to catch a glimpse of the birds heading south for the winter.
What Brown probably enjoys the most is being able to share his knowledge with young school children that are around the same age when his interest in nature began to take shape.
When it’s family time, Brown enjoys going out into the woods with his wife Julie, who is a monitoring site coordinator for the Hawk Migration Association of North America, and their two children, Laurel, 7, and Alden, 5.
“There’s very few boundaries between my work and my personal life,” Brown said.
When birds are a little harder to come by in the winter months, Brown said the family is into tracking during their walks in the woods.
“My kids are more excited about that,” he said.
And what seems to be like one of those moments that was just meant to be, Brown and Julie met on the summit of Pack Monadnock.
“She was there as a hawk watcher and I had dragged myself up the mountain for the day trying to find the Golden Eagle,” Brown said.
So it’s easy to see where that spot at the top of Pack – 2,290 feet in elevation – holds a special meaning for the family.
“Our kids have spent every fall on that mountain,” Brown said.
He’s been a tour guide for 15 years, leading groups in places from Alaska to Central America. Last month he went to Trinidad where he got to cross another species off his list, the Scarlet Ibis.
“I would have been happy to see one of them, but we saw an estimated 10,000 fly into the roost,” Brown said. “The trees turned bright red in a matter of minutes. That’s what evokes that same excitement for birds from when I was a kid.”
In October, he will head to Mexico “to see the hawk migration where it’s the greatest concentration of raptors in the world,” Brown said. Columbia is high on his list of places to go with almost 2,000 bird species living in the country.
Brown, who helps coordinate the Keene Christmas Bird Count, isn’t driven by finding new species, which he estimates is already in the thousands. It’s about the experience that makes him feel like a kid again.
“I’m more excited about the birds in my own backyard,” he said.
Brown first came to New Hampshire as a student at Rutgers, making a winter ascent of Mount Washington. A few years later he spent five weeks camping around Alaska.
“I got to see the opportunities that were out there for someone to manage wildlife, large pieces of land,” he said.
He got the job at NH Audubon and moved to the seacoast at first and then around Concord. It was when he enrolled at Antioch for his graduate work in conservation biology that he moved to the Monadnock Region. He just so happened to be the last teaching assistant for Meade Cadot, the longtime Harris Center executive director. He landed an easement monitoring position for the Harris Center through Antioch and has been involved with the Hancock-based organization ever since. And the area seemed to be the perfect place to stay.
“The woods of the Monadnock Region, it’s where I feel most at home,” Brown said.
Brown recently picked up the piano again after some training as a kid.
“Can’t read music anymore, just can play by ear,” he said.
The family has a collection of 15 peach trees on their Hancock property that they sell at the Hancock Farmers’ Market.
“If it’s a good peach season, I have to take time off to harvest,” Brown said. He also trades some with a neighbor for blueberries.
Brown is currently chair of the Hancock Conservation Commission, spending the last seven years serving in a capacity where he can help make town properties more attractive and user friendly.
He’s been known to play a little basketball, something his son Alden told him he’s good at, Brown said. And he cross-country skis.
“Just in our back woods,” Brown said. “Just a way to move around the woods. Anything that gets me outside.”
Being among the trees and mountains, fields and lakes that make New Hampshire so beautiful is where Brown feels drawn to. Because it makes him feel like that kid who fell in love with nature in that small Staten Island patch of woods.
“There’s such a bigger world out there. It may start in your backyard like it did for me, but there’s so much more out there,” Brown said.