Our Team

Kate Scott & Tony Heath retired from the music business in 1999 to restore Birdland Ranch, a historic remote ranch nestled in the Huachuca Mountains surrounded by the Coronado National Forest in southeast Arizona. Together they founded a non-profit, Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center (MAWC), to advocate for WILDERNESS and WILDLIFE, make ART, foster LOVE and COMPASSION, and generally promote GOODWILL. MAWC is a volunteer-run organization with Kate serving as President and Tony as Treasurer.

Tony rescued Tom, our sweet mini-dachshund with megaesophagus, we were blessed to have for 14 1/2 years. Tom crossed over the rainbow bridge June 24, 2022. Due to his disease (which had a very grave prognosis), and having to feed him vertically 4 to 6 times daily, we took him with us everywhere. This film, “For a Good Mom” was created a couple of months before his passing.
We miss him everyday.

Robin Motzer
Secretary
"I sing in harmony with all of nature's voices, Knowing that simplicity and kindness are choices. I connect with the earth in my bare feet, My heart connects with all of life's beat;”  Robin shares her poem, I AM Nature, We Are Nature, San Pedro Anthology, Volume I.

As a nature lover-naturalist, Robin's goal is to reconnect people with nature through art, poetry, articles, videos, photography, habitat restoration, regenerative farming and conservation projects. Working with those who want to preserve nature for future generations in perpetuity is her passion. Her website is coming soon at wildlandsrestoration.org, poetry book, and a book about food, farming and freedom. Our future is bright when we Unite. May all beings live with liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness! “I AM Loud Hawk, Poet With A Purpose!”

Robin serves as Secretary for Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center. She co-organized San Pedro River events, as well as supporting Kate’s couple of runs for AZ Game and Fish Commissioner. She has been a passionate Voice for Wildlife having presented at AZ Game and Fish meetings and on the floor of the State Capital regarding compassion and co-existing with nature. 

Rachel Arney
Jaguar Rising Campaign Coordinator
Rachel Arney is a PhD candidate in the geography and integrative conservation programs at the University of Georgia. She is a political ecologist interested in the intersection of power, politics, and conservation. She studies how knowledge about the environment is produced and contested along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Rachel joined MAWC as an intern in Fall 2022 and helped in the creation of the borderlands wildlife connectivity campaign, Jaguar Rising. She looks forward to continuing to help MAWC and Jaguar Rising reach audiences in and beyond the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. 

Toni MacNamara
Community Outreach Coordinator

Toni blissfully retired from living and raising her family in the idyllic White Mountains, to her new Eden: the Madrean Sky Islands of southeast Arizona. She and husband Dennis have a five acre Emory Oak canopied ranchito in Lyle Canyon, near Kate and Tony’s Birdland Ranch. Being a lifelong wanderer upon, and lover and protector of her Earth Mother, Toni arrived with a goal to get to know their new neighbors: the 7,000+ plant and animal species that inhabit this spectacularly biodiverse ecoregion. Tony and Kate, Birdland Ranch and the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center have become a valued resource as well as dear friends in our mission to live, learn and tread lightly in reverence and respect for this land and fellow co-habitants. We support MAWC whenever and however we are able.

"Hi everyone, I'm Valeria Angel, I am currently pursuing my Masters at ASU in Sustainability Solutions, after obtaining a BS in Sustainability Science in 2021 from Montclair State University. I am originally from Colombia, but moved to NJ in 2012 and have been in AZ since summer of 2022! My interests post grad life revolve around the interconnectedness of environmental justice, food justice and social justice. My ongoing personal and professional goal is to be a part of creating equity within the community and partaking in the storytelling processes to do so. " 

Hannah Hansen
San Pedro River/Border Wall Research

Hannah’s work involves assessing changes to the San Pedro River’s morphology and debris transport regime using GPS tracking of large woody debris (LWD), repeat photo stationing, grain size analyses, cross-sectional surveys, and hydraulic modeling downstream of the border wall. She compared data from surveys in December 2022 to data collected in May 2021 following construction of the border wall over the river, but before any flooding. The results illustrate an increase in debris accumulation, bank erosion, scour pools, and bed material complexity downstream of the border in the two years since construction. Whether or not these changes to the river’s bedform, debris assortment, and flooding upstream have significant ecological consequences remains to be seen, but the presence of the wall itself has proven itself a barrier to wildlife. The border wall represents a novel type of hydraulic barrier outside the scope of dams, weirs, and culverts that have been studied extensively. As such, limitations to longitudinal connectivity inflicted by the border wall warrant further study. Developing a chronology of woody debris and its movement around the border wall will help to assess if debris damming at the floodgate structures will result in increased erosion, scouring, and flooding upstream of the border, and what implications this may have for the integrity of the border wall itself. Methods developed in this study can be applied to other transboundary rivers that are impacted by the border wall.
Hannah hopes to return to the border wall to complete additional surveys in the future and is always looking for local and transboundary partnerships to continue and expand this work upstream of the wall.