Heather Hansman

Heather Hansman is an award-winning freelance writer and the best-selling author of Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow and Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Outside, among other publications. She lives in Durango, Colorado, right by the river.

Meet the artist whose decoys are rebuilding the world’s seabird colonies

For more than a decade, Sue “Seabird Sue” Schubel’s lifelike decoys have anchored a global seabird restoration effort built on “social attraction,” luring colony-nesting birds back to lost or safer habitats, a strategy that Audubon scientists say has already aided about a third of the world’s seabird species, including some of the most endangered.

June 10, 2026