The Birds & Beansâ„¢ story began in Toronto in 1998 when Madeleine and David Pritchard opened their Café and Roastery – serving only ‘Bird Friendly’® coffee. Ten years later Scott Weidensaul (Pulitzer prize finalist author and naturalist, ‘Living on the Wind’, ‘Of a Feather’) and Bill Wilson took up the cause to shift coffee drinking behavior of bird lovers in New England and New York.  Bill’s Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) ‘Bird Friendly’® certification means that Birds & Beans â„¢ coffee is 100%-organic shade-grown, ensuring the conservation of migratory bird habitat in Latin America. Tanagers, thrushes, orioles, warblers, oven-birds and other wonderful birds nesting in Northeast America find sanctuary in the rustic canopy, rain forest-like environments of family coffee farms that carry the SMBC certification. Sun grown coffee – genetically modified and heavily dependent on chemical fertilization, pesticides and herbicides – adds to the destruction of critical bird habitat in Latin America. ‘Birds & Beans the good coffee’ â„¢ is part of the solution. He wants to help add thousands of hectares of shade grown, organic coffee habitat to the farms already producing a truly sustainable and environmentally responsible crop.

The Birds & Beans team has grown to include three ‘ Voices for the Birds‘ – authors, naturalists, educators and conservationists. Kenn Kaufman (‘Kingbird Highway’, Kaufman Field Guide series) and Bridget Stutchbury (‘Silence of Songbirds’, Professor and Director of The Stutchbury Lab at York University, Toronto) have joined Scott Weidensaul in getting the word out about The Good Coffee. Kenn, Bridget and Scott are touring New England and New York in 2009 and 2010 for The Birds & Beans Talks â„¢, a series of free lectures about the birds we know and love and how our lives and theirs are inexorably connected.   An optional lunch with our speaker will follow the Garden Club of the Back Bay  meeting, which will take place at The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.  Guests welcome. Pre-registration required.  Luncheon is $19 per person.  For additional information, email info@bostonflora.com.