Growing up as she did, it may have been inevitable that Zara Beard would eventually make it her mission to rescue wildlife and protect the natural world.
Her late father, the noted artist and photographer Peter Beard, had spent the better part of his career documenting the vanishing wildlife of the African continent, and her earliest years before she started school were split between Montauk and Africa.
So when she founded her conservation nonprofit, EchoWild, this year, it was the culmination of “a lifetime of moments, of growing up and seeing the world through a certain lens,” she said.
“I think something my dad was amazing at doing was he made people feel, through his work and even just through who he was. He was so charismatic and open and funny and intelligent.” Her father taught her “that the wild isn’t something separate from us. It’s something we’re part of, and something that breathes alongside us. I grew up with that understanding, but I also grew up watching people forget it. I saw places change and disappear. I saw wildlife struggle, landscapes shrink, and people essentially just drift further and further from nature.”
Ms. Beard has big dreams for EchoWild, but “I want to start where I live because it’s what I know, and I want to prove that change is possible.” Home is East Hampton, where she lives with her husband, Jonathan Davis, a landscape designer, her 5-year-old daughter, Daisy, and three dogs, three cats, and two guinea pigs.
Along with bigger-picture goals like preserving wilderness and educating the community about the “fragility of the natural world,” one of EchoWild’s first tangible initiatives will be the opening of a wildlife trauma unit in East Hampton in partnership with the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center. Ms. Beard is a volunteer there, and is now studying to be a veterinary technician.
The Evelyn Alexander Center is a wildlife hospital that treats and rehabilitates animals impacted by human activity and encroachment, and it has volunteers across the North and South Forks who transport injured and sick wild animals to its facility in Hampton Bays. The issue with that is “if you get a call to rescue a baby deer that’s been hit by a car in Montauk and you have to drive to Hampton Bays, you’re looking at like a seven-hour round trip or something, and people don’t want to do it,” Ms. Beard said. She is saddened to think of “all the animals that weren’t even given a chance at being rescued.”
She saw the need for a facility on the South Fork that would serve as a sort of emergency room where animals could be taken to be stabilized. Some could be treated and released in East Hampton, but those requiring longer-term care could be sent on to Hampton Bays. She learned from the rescue center’s executive director, Kathleen Mulcahy, that the Evelyn Alexander Center had long been seeking the same thing, and plans began to take shape.
Jonathan Turetsky, a veterinarian who is on the board of the wildlife rescue center, offered Ms. Beard a space beneath his Veterinary Clinic of East Hampton. She had originally envisioned opening the wildlife trauma unit in the spring of 2026, but an unexpected donation has pushed the timeline forward to this spring. Now, with luck and a lot of hard work, the unit could be open at 3 Goodfriend Drive around Memorial Day.
“There are so many things that need to still be put into place in order for that to happen,” she said.
She has been working feverishly to learn everything she can from Dr. Turetsky and the dedicated team at the rescue center. “They’re so brilliant and they’ve been so amazing and welcoming, and the girls that run the hospital are just so blindingly intelligent and cool that it’s been a really great opportunity.” Prior to this, she had a mentorship with Bethany Brown, executive director of the Saco River Wildlife Rescue Center in Maine. “She’s kind of like an earth angel. She’s the kindest, most amazing woman. She turned her entire house into a wildlife rescue center.”
Wildlife medicine and wildlife rehabilitation are “like the Wild West,” Ms. Beard said. “It’s one of the only fields that I can think of where there is just so much that is undiscovered and unexplored and unknown, and that’s one of the things that’s really cool about it.”
EchoWild’s other initiatives are in response to problems Ms. Beard saw affecting the animals that were ending up in the wildlife hospitals: habitat loss, pollution, and “ecosystems out of balance.”
“After treatment, it’s critical to ensure that we are returning these animals to environments where they can thrive,” she writes on the EchoWild website, “not, for example, releasing waterfowl who were just treated for lead poisoning back into ponds where they’ll face the same threat again.”
To that end, the nonprofit will encourage people to plant rain gardens, work to reduce the use of harmful lawn chemicals, promote wildlife tunnels and corridors and pollinator-friendly wildflower roadside strips, and distribute wildlife-safe fishing kits at popular fishing spots.
“It is a holistic approach to conservation,” Ms. Beard said. “It is essentially trying to address entire ecosystems from the bottom up, looking at the wildlife because they are such a barometer of what’s happening.”
“What I aim to do is just connect people with what is already inside of them and remind them of what’s beautiful and why we should protect it.”
In that, she is inspired by her father, but, she said, “I think where my dad and I slightly differ . . . he was an eternal optimist and an extremely positive person, but he did have a less optimistic view of what people would do to save our world. It was kind of just like ‘We’re fucked,’ and we are, but I also do think that change happens on a community level and that many small changes equal big change. And I refuse to give up. I’m really stubborn. The wild has always been talking to us; I just think people have stopped listening.”
Growing up with a parent who was so well known and “larger than life,” it may also have been inevitable that Ms. Beard would, for a time, try harder to forge a different path for herself. She started college as an art student, then shifted to studying environmental science. She went to cooking school, and then went back to Africa, where she did some work with the World Wildlife Fund. “It was an evolution.”
When she got serious about EchoWild, she turned for guidance to Rajiv Joshi, who was associate dean of the Columbia Climate School and now leads Project Regeneration. He serves on her governance team and, through Bridging Ventures, helped her secure fiscal sponsorship from the nonprofit Res Publica US Inc. That allows EchoWild to accept tax-deductible donations while still awaiting its official nonprofit designation.
She is still getting used to asking for financial support, but it will be critical to the success of the trauma unit and EchoWild’s other initiatives. “I’m not taking a salary,” she said. “Every single dollar that is raised is going straight into all of the initiatives.”
The website, echo-wild.org, is also the place to connect with her about volunteering or offering things like towels, and she can be emailed directly at [email protected].
