On a bright October afternoon in Greenport, the North Fork Audubon Society cut a ribbon of Virginia creeper and opened a new “Berries for Birds” garden in honor of longtime board member and volunteer naturalist Rick Kedenburg — a gentle, owl-whistling mentor whose late-life devotion to nature and land conservation inspired the new garden.
“It’s a beautiful day to dedicate a beautiful garden,” North Fork Audubon President Peggy Lauber said at the ceremony on Saturday, recalling how Kedenburg and his wife, Linda, were already veterans of the organization when she joined the board 14 years ago.
Lauber told the crowd about evening walks at the Jack Levin Preserve — a nighttime “owl prowl” where Kedenburg’s pitch-perfect great horned owl call drew an immediate answer from the dark.
Lauber was “so totally impressed … I was hooked.” Lauber said. Kedenburg became a mentor to her.
“There was just simply no one who cared more deeply about birds and their place in the framework of the natural world than Rick,” she said.
Kedenburg, who died of cancer in 2023 at age 72, made a significant gift after his diagnosis that enabled North Fork Audubon to design, fence and plant the new pergola garden. The project is the latest in a string of habitat installations at the Red House headquarters in Inlet Pond County Park, including a rain garden and the “native songscape” planting.
The new space is a curated palette of shrubs and trees that set fruit during fall migration and carry berries into the lean months, when migrants and overwintering birds need the most calories.
Board member Dr. Ellen Birenbaum traced the garden’s origin to a pair of public talks that changed how the chapter thought about yards and parks.
In 2020, entomologist Doug Tallamy introduced the group to the idea of “cooperative conservation,” the notion that thousands of small native plantings can add up to meaningful habitat — what he called a “Homegrown National Park.”
A year later, author and ornithologist Scott Weidensaul spoke on the global odyssey of migratory birds. When someone asked how to help, “his answer was simple,” Birenbaum said. “Plant berry-producing trees to help refuel migrating birds at stopover sites during the fall migration.”
Since then, she has carried a science-based presentation on native berries across the East End, and the chapter has focused its plant sales and outreach on species that feed birds when they need it most.
Landscape designer and board member Robin Simmen led the three-year transformation of a weedy former pollinator plot into a berry garden that solves a familiar North Fork problem: deer.
“The birds aren’t the only ones that love berrying bushes,” Simmen said.
With Kedenburg’s grant, the chapter installed an eight-foot woven-wire fence on three sides and, in front, a pair of four-foot fences spaced five feet apart — a proven “psychological” barrier deer won’t jump.
The crew cleared invasives in phases beginning in 2022, slowly remediated the soil — and waited until fall 2024 to install most of the natives, two-thirds of which were provided through a grant from Rewild North Fork.
“The planting is the fun part,” Simmen said, “but it was two years of soil remediation to get there.” Even so, the first growing season surprised the team.
“I couldn’t believe the survival rate this spring. The mortality rate was very, very low.”
Inside the fence, Virginia creeper threads the structure, and several species — native honeysuckle, viburnum and red chokeberry among them — have fruited.
The garden layers bloom and food through four seasons: spring flowers for insects, summer color from black-eyed Susans and cardinal flower (a hummingbird magnet this year), and persistent winter berries.
For five to six years, NFAS board members Carol Edwards and Theresa Dilworth —with guidance from native-plant expert Andy Senesac — have led weekly work sessions to knock back mugwort, mile-a-minute, Oriental bittersweet and feral privet across the park.
Kedenburg’s niece, Kym Springston, traveled with family to the dedication and helped cut the ceremonial ribbon of Virginia creeper. “He was the gentle giant of our family,” she said. In the 1990s, when her uncle was still commuting to Wall Street, she urged him to try the Audubon Society on Oyster Bay.
“I said, ‘you need to do something that’s communing with nature, something calming, something that will touch your soul’ … And he came. That was 1995, and that’s when he got his start at Audubon.”
From there, Kedenburg met Linda Vardy, moved to the North Fork and became a wildlife rehabilitator and year-round volunteer. “This is his legacy,” Springston said.
Family memories sketched a portrait of a man who found his calling later in life and then leaned into it with both hands. As a young man in Glen Cove, he rescued escaped parakeets from a pet shop and created “branches” inside his home so the birds could live uncaged.
He fed gulls and crows, doted on turtles — a nod, relatives said, to a sliver of Lenape heritage — and, once settled on the North Fork, filled his yard with feeders. Friends remembered Christmas Bird Counts and beach days protecting piping plover nests.
He also put land protection into practice. Family members said Kedenburg and his wife helped secure conservation of acreage at the end of Henry’s Lane, buying and donating a significant portion to Peconic Land Trust.
“This is my legacy. No one can take this land,” he told his family.
He died at home, as he wished, “with his little woodland friends,” his sister Charlotte Scotto said.
Lauber emphasized that Kedenburg’s generosity is seeding more than shrubs. Recognizing that many North Fork breeders winter in Central America, North Fork Audubon has formed a Baltimore Oriole Committee — choosing a familiar migrant as its emblem — to explore partnerships with conservation groups in the birds’ wintering range.
“We all worry about habitat loss here on the North Fork,” she said, “but we don’t think about the fact that these birds travel … where the habitats there are being decimated.”
The goal is long-term collaboration and environmental education with local communities abroad, funded in part by Kedenburg’s bequest.
“This is like a rebirth,” Lauber said. “Taking that money and making it into something much, much greater and more meaningful.”
The dedication also served as a teach-in on practical habitat.
Attendees flipped through the chapter’s new “Berries for Birds” brochure, picked up tips on deer-excluding fences that can be copied at home, and heard Simmen’s plain-spoken message: “This is not rocket science. We can all do this.”
The chapter’s plan is to keep adding better-performing species, tightening signage throughout the park and using the garden as a hub for public talks and native-plant sales so yards across the North Fork become pieces of a larger corridor.