Eric Fishel ’08 introduces city residents to overlooked beauty: the yellow warblers and jewelweed plants that make Baltimore their home. As an urban ecologist, he’s committed to celebrating, as well as protecting, the natural world that also defines city life.
“Although there is already a deep, ingrained love of nature in communities everywhere, a lot of people don’t realize that they can experience that joy and connection in urban spaces,” Fishel says. “Our programs open folks’ eyes. They start feeling like nature is for them, that conservation is for them, and that environmentalism is for them.”
Fishel directs Birds of Urban Baltimore (B.Ur.B), a nonprofit he founded in 2019 with help from the Open Society Institute. B.Ur.B offers opportunities to engage with bird conservation and science through activities such as bird banding.
He also leads programming in forest stewardship for Baltimore Green Space, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting community-managed green spaces, and empowering neighbors with the tools, knowledge, and resources to care for those spaces.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in biology, Fishel worked on avian conservation research projects in seven states and seven countries. He received his master’s degree in natural resources from the University of Missouri, where he studied the impact of land management practices on birds and plants in an urban residential area.
“Urban ecology is understudied partly because it’s hard, it’s scary, and there’s a lot of assumptions about what isn’t in urban ecosystems,” he says. “We’re redesigning the way we do our banding in Baltimore to better understand the distribution of birds around the city.”
During his time at Hopkins, Fishel became a wrestling legend. Inducted into the Johns Hopkins Sports Hall of Fame in 2020, he was the first wrestler in university history to win 90 or more matches and the first to win a pair of Centennial Conference titles, placing first at 184 pounds as a junior and senior. He also became Hopkins’ first All-American athlete, placing eighth at the NCAAs as a senior. He now serves as an assistant wrestling coach at Hopkins.
