Today is Melissa’s birthday. She didn’t mention it. She won’t. So we’re telling you — because you should know a little bit about the person who has been in this fight for wildlife for the last fourteen years.

Right now, today, Melissa is on chemotherapy. She is on steroids. She has microscopic vasculitis — a serious autoimmune disease that attacks the blood vessels from the inside. It took three years to get that diagnosis. Three years of not knowing what was wrong. Three years of her body fighting her, while she was out here fighting for wolves.

She didn’t slow down. That’s just who she is.

During the pandemic, when most people were staying home, Melissa went to work twelve-hour days for her dad — helping get COVID test kits out to people who needed them. Every day. Because someone had to, and she was someone who could.

She has rehabbed wildlife — including a raccoon, which honestly tracks completely. She knows Wisconsin’s wildcare laws inside and out. She has done investigative work. She does stand-up comedy. She served eight years as an elected delegate to the Wisconsin Conservation Congress — the body that hunting interests had controlled for decades — because she believed the people who love Wisconsin’s wildlife deserved a voice at that table. So she ran. And she won.

She has been the Great Lakes field representative for the Endangered Species Coalition. She has lobbied in Washington. She built this organization — Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf & Wildlife, Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance — from nothing, funded entirely by people like you, because she wanted to be free to say exactly what needed to be said, without anyone telling her she couldn’t.

She believes we can win. Not as a hope she holds onto. As something she has proven — in courts, in hearing rooms, in conservation congress meetings — over and over, for fourteen years.

This winter, Wisconsin wolves are still alive. No hunt. No quota. No bodies in the snow. That is not luck. That is what happens when one person refuses to stop, no matter what her body is doing, no matter what it costs, no matter how long it takes.

Today she turns another year older. She wants one thing — not for herself, she never wants anything for herself — she wants wildlife to be protected. She wants the work to go on. She wants the wolves to still be running next year, and the year after that.

If this work has ever mattered to you, today is the day to say so.

Give her the only birthday gift she actually wants.