Wildlife biologist Emily Jo Williams’s ears are always tuned for birdsong. “I can’t turn it off,” she says, identifying the buzzy trill of a prairie warbler as she pauses along a forest path near Georgetown, South Carolina, and raises her binoculars to scan a faraway cypress for a swallow-tailed kite nest. Over nearly four decades, her stints with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Longleaf Alliance shaped a mission far bigger than any one spec