Birds Georgia Volunteer Spotlight: Courtenay Dusenbury

By Steve Phenicie
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(This column, which ran in Wingbars for 11 years, will continue electronically. This is the 69th in a series on Birds Georgia volunteers, board members, and staff.)

Not many birders can say they’ve worked to fight leprosy. Or run the Boston Marathon. Or worked for the governor of Puerto Rico, the Pennsylvania Legislature, and the U.S. Congress. But Courtenay Dusenbury, treasurer of Birds Georgia’s Board of Directors, can.

Courtenay, a native of Wisconsin, later lived in State College, Pa., where her father was employed at Penn State University. She graduated from Penn State herself, then engaged in a long series of interesting endeavors. Along the way she earned a masters degree of public health in health economics. After working for the Pennsylvania State Senate and deciding that wasn’t quite for her, she went to Puerto Rico to visit friends. There she landed a job in the commonwealth’s government and ended up working in various roles for five or six years.

She then worked for Congress as a legislative director for three different lawmakers. Such a person is in charge of the positions that the person is going to take – determining what is in bills and their practical impact.

After that came her 25-year career at Emory University’s Global Health Institute. Among the things she did was to help the university set up a global partnership to deal with leprosy, the only tropical disease that didn’t have an umbrella organization working on the problem. She had no experience with this disease but did have expertise in working with ministries of health in various countries to develop their own CDCs. Today leprosy remains a problem, even in the United States, but progress is being made, Courtenay says.

Courtenay has been birding since she was a child, following in the footsteps of her mother. When she was growing up they had a couple of acres of their own and were surrounded by farmland, so they spent a lot of time in the woods, with or without binoculars. For many years she didn’t bird, but seven or eight years ago her interest grew as she got more free time. After her parents moved to Georgia in 2000, they birded together. Courtenay has been on Birds Georgia trips to Alabama and Florida and hopes to try some of the overseas offerings.

She is also on the Decatur team of Project Safe Flight. Those are the people who, in the name of science, get up at an ungodly hour to find dead birds that have hit buildings overnight. She also helped Decatur earn the Bird City designation and has aided the Habitat Restoration Team with seed collecting. Her yard is a Birds Georgia-certified wildlife sanctuary. 

As for running, she isn’t doing any marathons right now but is training for a half-marathon. Her Boston Marathon was in 2018. “I’m proud of it, but I’ll probably never do it again,” she says.

Courtenay has been retired for 2½ years. She and her husband, George, live in Decatur and have two adult sons who live nearby. George V works for a Belgian IT company, and William is about to start graduate school. 

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