New director lands Grace-fully at Sharon Audubon Center

SHARON — The Sharon Audubon Center has a new director.Sean Grace began work on Thursday, May 1, taking the reins from Educational Program Director Wendy Miller, who had served as interim director in the months since former director Scott Heth had left to take another job, in September 2013. Born in Danbury, Grace spent the first year of his life in Newtown, Conn., before his family moved to Massachusetts, settling northwest of Boston. Growing up, he said, he loved to be outdoors whether it was hiking, kayaking, canoeing or cross-country skiing.After graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in business management, Grace combined his business degree with his love of the outdoors, managing several mountaineering shops for Eastern Mountain Sports and Blue Ridge Mountain Sports.After several years in retail, he enrolled at the Teton Science School in Jackson, Wyo., where he did a professional residency in environmental education. While there, he tapped into his outdoor expertise in both animal tracking and cross-country skiing and conducted research projects on elk, coyote and moose as well as on winter ecology and snow ecology.He went on to earn a master’s degree at Montclair State University’s New Jersey School of Conservation. In 2001, he became director of Wildlife Expeditions in Wyoming, where he trained and managed a group of wildlife biologists in offering educational programs on the wildlife and ecology of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.Grace then served for nine years as the sanctuary director at New Jersey’s Audubon Plainsboro Preserve. There, he created a program that connected the community with nature.For the past year he has been helping with research operations at Princeton University at the Stony Ford Field Research Station. Among other things, he has worked on making ecological assessments and a list of vascular plants, trees and invasive plants in the area.When he learned of the opening at the Audubon in Sharon, Grace and his wife, Maria, visited in March, to see whether they liked it here enough to move themselves and their two young boys from New Jersey to Connecticut. While driving around the back roads of town, they stumbled across the Miles Wildlife Sanctuary on West Cornwall Road. After spotting an immature bald eagle flying overhead, the two observed a tan-colored animal walk out onto the ice of the lake and begin to feed on an animal carcass. They quickly realized they were watching a bobcat feeding on a deer carcass. Impressed with the abundance of wildlife here, they decided to accept the position and move to Sharon once their children finished school in the summer.Just barely two months into the new job, Grace has already busied himself with a large project involving the Eastern Forest initiative and Atlantic Flyway. This is a project in which interested private land owners with large tracts of forest can get a property assessment from Audubon. The assessment includes tips on how to best maintain their properties to ensure birds continue to nest there. Anyone interested can contact the Audubon Center by calling 860-364-0520 or going online to www.sharon.audubon.org.Grace and his wife will live in a house on the Audubon property with their two boys, Cooper Ridge and Elden Winter.