Kate McKay (she/her) is a birder and naturalist from upstate New York. Her lifelong love of nature inspired her to study environmental biology and applied ecology at Cornell University, as well as to pursue a career in conservation. Kate has conducted field studies for many nature organizations in the Northeast, including surveying whip-poor-wills for the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, documenting amphibian road crossings for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and conducting songbird surveys for the National Park Service. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, drawing, and photography.
We first hired Kate as an easement monitoring intern in the summer of 2024. She loved it so much that she returned for a second summer of easement monitoring in 2025, as well as taking on an additional role as our 2025 Forestry & Wildlife Intern, which involves assisting Phil Brown with bird monitoring projects.
In the fall of 2025 she was hired to work as our Raptor Biologist at the Pack Monadnock Raptor Observatory, which regularly records more than 11,000 fall-migrating raptors each year. You can read her article “Diary of an Easement Monitoring Intern,” which documents her experience working for the Harris Center in writing and photographs, here.
