About the Friends of Blackwater

Latest News

• Friends Featured in Heritage Spotlight
• Friends Receive Heart of Chesapeake Country Heritage Award
• Friends Receive Commendations for their 30th Anniversary!

The Friends of Blackwater is a nonprofit citizens support group founded in 1987, assisting Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Cambridge, Maryland, and the Chesapeake Marshlands National Wildlife Refuge Complex to carry out their educational, interpretive, and public use missions. Currently our ranks include over 400 members who have helped us become one of the preeminent voluntary conservation organizations in our area. The Friends of Blackwater are part of the larger network of almost 200 Friends groups that support the National Wildlife Refuge System around the country.

Members of the Friends of Blackwater exercise varying degrees of involvement, although many members find satisfaction in volunteering their time to help the group in its various activities, such as operating The Eagle's Nest Book and Gift Shop in the Blackwater NWR Visitor Center. All proceeds from the gift shop go toward purchasing items or services that are not funded by the Department of Interior.

As federal budgets shrink, groups like the Friends of Blackwater are more essential than ever in helping to protect treasures such as Blackwater NWR. Take a moment to explore this section of our website and learn more about our current projects, how to become a member or a volunteer, and how to get our newsletter.

Friends of Blackwater Board of Directors

Rick Abend

Rick has been on the Friends of Blackwater Board since 2005, served as Vice-President since 2006, and now as President since October 2013. With an avid interest in forestry and wildlife management, Rick also serves on the Dorchester County Forestry Board, the Maryland Tree Farm Committee, and supports the Maryland Woodland Stewards Program. A lifelong Maryland resident, Rick had a 30-year federal career with the National Security Agency, holding both technical and managerial positions in the signals analysis field. In the U.S. Air Force, he worked on various aircraft weapons systems. Rick also served on the Board of Directors of Hull Federal Savings Bank in Baltimore, Maryland, for many years. After retiring in 1997, Rick moved to "Abend Hafen" (German for "Evening Haven"), a farm he has owned in Madison, Maryland, since 1972. In 2006, he married his wife, Kathy, and they enjoy managing their farm, hunting, wildlife photography, and conservation education. They were recognized as the 2014 Maryland Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year. Most recently, they received the 2018 Chesapeake Forest Champion Award for Exemplary Forest Stewardship from the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and U.S. Forest Service.

Friends of Blackwater Role: President, Executive Committee; Projects Committee Chair

Harry Heckathorn

Harry spent much of his youth enjoying fishing, camping and seasonal outdoor sports in Minnesota. An influential high school biology teacher encouraged him to join the Conservation Club and provided an opportunity to work on a tree farm. But it was the night sky and the launch of the first Sputnik that provided the inspiration for Harry to pursue a science career involving space—first in astronomy and then in space science and rocketry. He earned his doctorate in astrophysics in 1970, held a post-doctoral position at what was then NASA's Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, worked in the Physics Departments of the University of Houston and Johns Hopkins University, and worked 25 years in the Space Science Department of the Naval Research Laboratory where he developed astronomical instruments for use at terrestrial observatories, on sounding rockets, and on the Space Shuttle. With the demise of the Space Shuttle Challenger he became interested in rocketry and missile defense and managed the development and use of simulation software and data archiving and retrieval facilities for the Missile Defense Agency. Now, with his feet firmly planted in Dorchester County, Maryland, Harry has taken the opportunity to return to the conservation activities of his youth.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Vice President, Executive Committee; Projects Committee; Wildlife Cam Support

Jill Levin

Born in Washington, DC and raised in Montgomery County, Maryland, Jill began her financial journey in the early 1990s when she became co-owner and managing partner of a real estate buyers brokerage franchise in Melbourne, Florida. At the same time, she started and ran her own mortgage brokerage business. Moving back to the Washington DC area to start her family, she was the business manager of a Bethesda dental practice for 12 years. She pivoted back into mortgages with a concentration on assisting single mother first time home buyers. Jill retired in 2023 as a Senior Loan Officer, and currently works part time as a licensed Title Insurance Producer Independent Contractor and conducts real estate settlements. In 2023, Jill completed the Maryland Master Naturalist Program at Blackwater NWR. She also began her volunteer work with Friends of Blackwater at that time, and in 2024 accepted an offer to serve as Treasurer of the Friends of Blackwater Board of Directors. Jill highly recommends the Maryland Master Naturalist course to everyone. This course led Jill to learn about Friends of Blackwater, and we are glad she did. Jill and her husband Steve relocated to Cambridge in 2020 from Montgomery County, where they first met while in elementary school. They are both now mostly retired and are full-time residents on the Shore. In their spare time, Jill and Steve enjoy volunteering at Blackwater (they live just 10 minutes away), kayaking, fishing, enjoying local seafood, and taking advantage of the Arts in the Easton-Cambridge area.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Treasurer, Executive Committee; Budget and Finance Committee Chair

Merrill Schuetz

As a native Houstonian, and having lived 20 miles from the New York Harbor and the New Jersey shore for 36 years, Merrill is no stranger to bay areas. Volunteering at Blackwater NWR was the natural thing to do when she retired in Cambridge and began life on the Choptank River in early 2017. Her 45 year professional career as a Registered Nurse, included clinical nursing staff development at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City and nursing instruction at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. Her favorite volunteer work was as serving as a Cub Scout den mother and Pack Committee Chair for 6 years when her son was young. In addition to her time spent at Blackwater, she and her husband enjoy kayaking, cycling, and hiking.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Secretary, Executive Committee; FOB Historian

Sue Fischer

Sue Fischer grew up as an Air Force brat and moved around a lot—spending most of her childhood in the Midwest and overseas. Once the moving bug hits, it is hard to stay in one place but at the advanced age of 30, she finally finished college and lit in northeastern Washington State where she and her former husband joined the hippie movement and built and lived in a cabin in the woods with electricity, but no running water. After several years of that paradise, which included skiing in and out to work everyday, she moved to Spokane where she taught elementary school for the next 20 years. Love brought her to Cambridge five years ago when she reconnected with her current wife, Kit Bradshaw, at the end of a cross country bike trip. They now live between Cambridge and Hurlock on Aeberle Road with 9 cats and four dogs. As an elementary teacher, Sue has been involved in Environmental Education for many years, which is what brought her to Blackwater NWR as a volunteer when she came to live in the area.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Director; Bookstore Manager Committee Chair; Environmental Education Committee

Ellie Ludvigsen

Ellie is a recent recruit to both the board (accepting her position in 2019) and to the Eastern Shore (buying a 100 year-old house in Cambridge in 2017). Although she grew up in Colorado and loved exploring the outdoors as a hyperactive kid, she discovered she was a water person when she saw the Gulf of Mexico at age 2 1/2. After undergraduate work, she spent 31 years working in the NYC Criminal Justice System, first as a female street gang worker and then in a variety of management, training, and program positions, gaining experience, insight, and humor in the often demeaned "badest" neighborhoods. She has a MA in Public Administration and Forensic Psychology. She fell in love with photography as a young child and has used visual and performing arts and full-body learning throughout her career to reach those who learn in non-traditional ways. She returned to Colorado in the mid-90's to take care of family obligations where she developed her photography interest into a business specializing in art and street photography and instruction. The latter morphed into helping many people with brain injuries or anomalies to use the tools of photography for rehab or advancement as well as general photography instruction. In Cambridge, she is active as a volunteer with Blackwater NWR at the Visitor Center, grade school programs, and other special projects. She is also active with the Cambridge Association of Neighborhoods, which promotes community and local government involvement. She loves to spend time outdoors, is enjoying water, renovating her home, keeping up with her two indoor, feral special-needs cats, having fun with her now adult grandson, and figuring out what she's going to be when she grows up.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Director; Environmental Education Committee Chair

Lisa Mayo

Lisa began her volunteer service in 2000 with the Friends of Blackwater. She designed the Friends' first website and helped bring the Blackwater Osprey Cam and Eagle Cam to the Internet back when raptor cams were a new innovation on the Web. In 2016, she redesigned the Friends' website to make it mobile friendly. In addition to webmaster duties, she's also the social media manager for the Friends and manages their Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, while also writing the Friends' email newsletter. Lisa is a video editor and frequently shares video clips online from the collection of wildlife cameras the Friends maintain at the Refuge. In her full-time job, Lisa is a Web Accessibility Team Manager at the consulting firm where she works. She helps clients make their websites accessible and inclusive to all user groups.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Director; Website/Social Media Committee Chair; Wildlife Cam Support

Janet Kerr

A native New Yorker, Janet relocated to Maryland to attend graduate school at the University of Maryland at College Park. After working as a molecular biologist at NIH and a biotech patent examiner at the USPTO, Janet retired to the Eastern Shore of Maryland with her husband where she became a photography enthusiast. Because of the wildlife viewing and the marshland vistas, visiting Blackwater NWR, camera in hand, became commonplace. To share her enthusiasm for the Refuge, Janet began volunteering at the Visitor Center in 2013. She joined the Friends of Blackwater in early 2015, serving as Secretary of the organization until late 2018. She is now involved in fundraising for projects and special events designed to enhance the visitors' experience at the Refuge.

Friends of Blackwater Role: Grant Writer