Avery Rollins, MMNSF Board Member

Meet Avery Rollins, MMNSF Board Member

June 6, 2025

Avery Rollins is a sixth generation Mississippian and is from Pike County, MS. He is a life member of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science (MMNS) Foundation and has served as a board member for 20 years.

Avery spent his early life on the family farm on the Bogue Chitto River which he still maintains near McComb. In 1965 he after receiving his law degree from the University of Mississippi, he joined the FBI as a Special Agent. As an FBI Agent he served in Connecticut, California, New York City, and Washington, D. C. He returned to Mississippi in 1975 where he served until retirement as a Supervisory Special Agent. In 1997, he received the FBI Shield of Bravery for his leadership in resolving a kidnapping/hostage situation in Jackson.

In retirement, he and Jackie, his wife of 58 years, enjoy an active outdoor life that includes camping, hiking, white water canoeing, and international travel to Central and South America; Southeast Asia; Europe and Africa. In 1999, they backpacked through Central America for six weeks. They are also involved in tree farming. They have three children and four grandchildren in North Carolina and Africa.

Avery’s experience living in large cities and travel in Third World Countries sharpened his resolve to become involved in Mississippi environmental issues, always working to preserve our natural resources. Environmental issues which he has addressed include the dredging of the Big Sunflower River; the Yazoo Pumps project; and the Two Lakes Project. He did this through his involvement with various national and state environmental organizations including the National Wildlife Federation and the Mississippi Wildlife Federation.

Avery feels a particular need to protect Mississippi’s environment, particularly the bottom land woodlands adjacent to the MMNS and LeFleur’s Bluff State Park. He is actively involved in protecting these “thin places.”

Jackie Posey Bailey, CPA, MMNSF Board Member

Meet Jackie Posey Bailey, CPA, MMNSF Board Member

May 15, 2025

Jackie Posey Bailey is a CPA retired after 27 years of tax practice in public accounting and 13 more serving the nonprofit sector.  Jackie last served as Chief Operating Officer at the Community Foundation for Mississippi.

Jackie grew up in south Jackson, is a proud member of the Forest Hill High School Class of 1977, and graduated from Ole Miss in 1981 with a BBA in Accounting. Jackie and her late husband, Ricky, have two children, Matthew and Mary Shellie, and five grandchildren.  Jackie currently divides her time between Byram and Oxford.

Jackie believes in giving back to the community in which she lives. Her volunteer work includes the Byram/Terry public schools and their parent teacher organizations, St. Therese Catholic Church, the Mississippi Commission on International Cultural Exchange art exhibits, Stewpot Community Services, Habitat for Humanity Mississippi Capital Area, Women’s Foundation of MS, Mississippi Society of CPAs, Methodist Children’s Homes of Mississippi, and the Mississippi Book Festival.

Jackie’s family has long enjoyed the MS Museum of Natural Science, and she looks forward to continuing that support with the MMNS Foundation.

My View of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science - by Andrew Whitehurst

by Andrew Whitehurst, MMNSF Board Member

Children need a way to fall in love with nature and they need places for this to happen. Current writing on child development explains and reinforces this need. The book “Last Child in the Woods” (2008) by Richard Louv is a good place to start.

When children reach adulthood with a solid tie to the natural world – plants, forests, mammals, birds, beaches, rivers, and yes … dinosaurs and fossils – it will remain with them and provide happiness, a built-in prescription for stress, and a way to unclutter a mind that is constantly stimulated by computer screens, tablets, and cell phones. 

When any one of us drifts back in memory, our affinity and need for a dose of nature is often tied to “place.” The Mississippi Museum of Natural Science (MMNS) in Jackson is such a place, situated on a 305-acre state park along the Pearl River, one of our state’s two major coastal plain rivers. For hundreds of thousands of school children and thousands of families with small children, the museum has provided a starting place and support for sparking that love for the natural world.

Inside the museum, there are beautiful and informative permanent exhibits, a whole hallway of aquariums, and the hall behind the fossil wall that holds traveling exhibits on a wide array of science subject matter. I see the aquariums as the face of the MMNS because they are beautiful, always in motion, and full of life: plants, frogs, fish, snakes, turtles.

When my son and daughter were young, I would wake them up on a Saturday and say, “Let’s go see the fish,” and they knew exactly where we were going.

Nothing draws children and their families like the various dinosaur exhibits, but many other types of exhibits have passed through the temporary exhibit hall.

One of my favorites in the early 2000s featured the art of Walter Inglis Anderson, the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s premier painter of barrier islands and their wildlife. Next to several of Anderson’s watercolors, the exhibit curators place a living specimen. There were living pitcher plants next to painted pitcher plants and tanks of turtles next to Anderson’s turtle renderings. The hallway was a celebration of art and nature that I’ve never forgotten.

Outside on the trails, if you’re quiet and patient, the daily or seasonal encounters you can have with wildlife and plants are abundant and often intimate. Seeing the first trilliums pop their green mottled leaves above the forest floor leaf litter in February, or the first gray rat snake of the spring sunning on a log; seeing a barred owl fishing for frogs or crayfish in one of the drying sloughs in late summer, or watching wading birds or wood ducks fly in at dusk to roost in trees in the Mayes Lake section of LeFleur’s Bluff State Park are some of the incredible “one on one” nature shows that the quiet trail walker can enjoy. 

The coolest thing I ever witnessed from one of the Museum’s swamp-viewing platforms was a male bowfin swimming along, guarding a school of his newly hatched fry, as they traveled and fed around the edge of the upper slough. Bowfin, Amia calva, are a primitive species of fish closely related to gar, and like gar can utilize oxygen for respiration without using their gills.

Gar species and bowfin have swim bladders into which they can gulp air from the water’s surface when water temperatures are high and dissolved oxygen concentration is low, and bowfin exhibit more parental care than most fish species. They aren’t true lungfish like in Africa, but they are perfectly adapted to life on the floodplain and can persist in summer heat in drying, muddy pools in the Pearl River’s backwater sloughs until fall cold front rains replenish them.

I got to have a secret peek into their life cycle when I observed a large male herding and protecting his school of tiny bowfin fry. The museum offers these amazing moments to all its visitors – but you have to keep all your senses ready.

A museum like ours, with beautiful and educational indoor exhibits and a floodplain forest swamp for a campus has secrets to share with the visitor, and all the visitor needs to do is show up ready. Our Mississippi Museum of Natural Science is ready to share these secrets with visiting school groups and families with small children – with anyone who walks in the door either paying admission or with an annual Museum Foundation membership.

One of the amazing things about our museum is that it is funded and maintained by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks – a state agency. Most states’ natural history museums are sponsored solely by universities or private foundations. The state legislature cared enough about the future of wildlife in Mississippi at the end of the 1930s to fund a game agency to regulate hunting and fishing and a museum to encourage education about Mississippi’s animals, plants, and habitats.

The Museum has a great heritage. It offers so much to children and families and has improved its offerings recently with a large modern playground in the front of LeFleur’s Bluff State Park, with a new trail and food concessions that make it easier for families to stay longer and enjoy more of what is there. Find a time to go see what’s going on – there is always something new and different to take in, whether inside or outside on the trails.

Find a connection to the place – mine is that I planted my grandmother Hazel’s maidenhair ferns in the snapping turtle tank when I worked at the museum, and in the 13 years since then, the staff divided and transplanted them into many of the other terrarium exhibits. I check on Hazel’s ferns every time I visit.

You can connect, too, and help support the museum’s mission: a Museum of Natural Science Foundation membership for a family is a great way to start.

Then, pick a nice morning and say to the people waking up in your home, “Let’s go see the fish, the dinosaurs, the trails.” 

Andrew Whitehurst, MMNSF Board Member

Meet Andrew Whitehurst, MMNSF Board Member

April 22, 2025

Andrew comes to the MMNS Foundation with a background that includes 11 years as a staff member in the museum’s research section where he was a coordinator in the Natural Heritage Program. He also supervised the museum’s aquarium staff in 2010, wrote and managed recreational trails grants to improve and repair museum trail features, and taught aquatics and fish biology regularly in the museum’s education programs for elementary and high school students. His grandmother’s maidenhair ferns can be found planted in many of the museum’s aquarium exhibits.

He currently works at the environmental non-profit advocacy organization Healthy Gulf as its water program director. Andrew holds a master’s degree in wildlife ecology from Mississippi State University (1990) and a law degree (1997) from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at LSU.

He coordinated the writing and passage of a 2003 Mississippi state tax credit covering costs of conservation easements created to protect sensitive habitats along nominated state scenic streams and on high-value conservation sites on private land.

He has lived in Madison, Mississippi since 1998 and is married to Cecilia Redmann Whitehurst. He has two grown children: Claire, an artist and teacher, and Andrew, a nurse and rock drummer.