Date: 3/6/25 11:00 am From: Barbara Volkle <barb620...> Subject: [MASSBIRD] Letter from Mary Keleher
Thanks to Mary Keleher for this post.
It's important for Mary to be able to get her story out and clear up misinformation.
PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS POST ON MASSBIRD! Please respect Mary and my request that you not do so.
Barbara Volkle Northborough, MA <barb620...>
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Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2025 08:55:16 +0000 (UTC) From: Mary K <bailey90...> Subject: Letter from Mary Keleher
I am sending this with permission of the moderator.
For those of you that don't know me I have been birding in Massachusetts for over 25 years. I am a past President of the Cape Cod Bird Club where I also served as Program Director for several years. I was a Regional Coordinator for Barnstable County for the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas II. I have been working with Purple Martins on Cape Cod for 18 years. Through my work I have successfully increased the Purple Martin population in Barnstable County from one small colony of 4-5 breeding pairs in 2007 to 7 colonies with 120 breeding pairs that fledged 487 young last year. My work has also led to an increase in their population statewide. I am a banding subpermittee. I have been banding my Purple Martins since 2012.
I'm sure many of you know there was an incident last Thursday on the Massachusetts Rare Bird Alert GroupMe where a group of people were asking members to quit the group in support of banning me and another member from the group. This group of people had sent a letter to the group administrator asking him to ban us. He refused to ban us because we had done nothing to violate the code of conduct of the RBA GroupMe.
Anyone that knows me is well aware of my support of girls' and women's sports. I strongly believe that boys and men should not be allowed to participate in girls' and women's sports. Occasionally I will post articles about this topic or share information on my personal Facebook page. This group of people has been trolling my public Facebook page. This is partially my own fault for not having a private Facebook page but I never ever imagined that a group of people would read information on my page and then write letters about me because they disagree with what I believe.
This group of people disliked the information that I posted on my page. This is why they sent a letter to the group administrator of the Massachusetts RBA GroupMe asking to have me banned. The administrator sent a letter in response declining to remove me from the group. The RBA GroupMe was cancelled. An individual from the group posted the groups' letter and the administrator's response letter on the Massachusetts Rare Bird Facebook page blaming the administrator for the demise of the RBA GroupMe saying "the demise of the group should fall on the administrator for lacking a spine to take action."
I am writing this because I want people to know that in the groups' letter to the administrator there were lies that were said about me and what I have posted on my personal Facebook page. They took my words from my posts and twisted them around to make it look like I said things that I never said.
Someone from this group had also sent a letter to my daughter's college. For the most part I was going to ignore all of this because I thought it was meaningless but once I found out that a letter was sent to people at my daughter's college I felt that I needed to put the word out there about this group of people. If the person from the group that had sent the letter to the college had been paying attention while trolling my Facebook page they would have seen the huge cover photo of my daughter that I posted last May when she graduated from the school.
I am in possession of this letter as well as the letters that were sent to the GroupMe moderator and the moderator's response letter. I have a copy of the information that was posted on the Massachusetts RBA Facebook page, which I was banned from. The post has since been deleted. I have proof that the wording in their letter does not match my wording of what I posted on my Facebook page.
The last thing I want to do is start a political debate about this on Massbird. I do not want what happened to the GroupMe to happen here. PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS POST ON MASSBIRD!
I believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and their own beliefs. I think it is unreasonable for a group of people to request to have someone removed from a birding group because of their personal beliefs. There's also a defamation aspect of this but I won't get into that here.
I mostly wanted to put this letter out there because of the misinformation that was being spread about me. I am more than willing to have conversations with people that would like to talk me about this and share any information that I can about what happened.
My email is <bailey90...>
Thank you to Barbara Volkle for allowing me to post this.
