Pursuing Audobon Certification

Asheville Municipal Golf Course is working toward certification as an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, and Friends of Asheville Muni is doing a good share of the work to get it there.

The program is run by Audubon International and built specifically for golf courses. Certification is not automatic and it is not quick. It is earned area by area, across environmental planning, wildlife and habitat management, water conservation, water quality management, chemical use reduction and safety, and outreach and education. Each one has to be documented with photographs, maps, records and species inventories, and the whole thing is confirmed by an on-site visit from Audubon International. Most courses take one to three years. Muni started in March 2025.

Some of that work is in the ground. Volunteers built and planted the pollinator garden on the slope above the 11th green. Native low-maintenance areas now sit in front of the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th tees, forming corridors wildlife can move through. Several winters of invasive removal have made room for native species to take hold again. Leaving those areas unmown also means less fuel burned and fewer emissions.

The rest of it is people. FOAM hosts the BioBlitz, a day spent counting everything alive on the course. In 2025, 82 neighbors and golfers turned out, which placed Muni second in the world in Audubon International's community engagement category. Family Moth Night, held with the North Carolina Arboretum, drew more than 70 people who identified over 100 species after dark. Nancy Casey, known around here as the Beverly Hills Bird Lady, leads bird walks and keeps a running inventory of the birds at the Muni and in Beverly Hills. What gets found is logged in the Asheville Muni project on iNaturalist, where anyone can go look at it.

This matters to FOAM because a municipal golf course is public land before it is anything else. It sits in the middle of a neighborhood, along a river, and what happens on it reaches past the people playing that day.

Paul Bonesteel put it plainly after the first BioBlitz: "It's still a golf course, of course! but it can be two things at once; a fun place to play the game we love, but also a place where nature can thrive."

Certification is a way of holding that up to a standard somebody else set, and proving it. The work continues, area by area. We will share each one here as it is confirmed.