Where do you work and what is your role?
I work at The Ohio State University as a postdoctoral researcher. I was brought on to work with the team planning the third Ohio Bird Atlas. These are community science projects where we ask people all over the state to record breeding birds—where they are and what stage they are: do they have a nest, do they have eggs? We survey in roughly 24.5-square-kilometer blocks across the entire state to get an even distribution of breeding bird records. We did the first atlas in the 1980s and the second in the early 2000s, so now we’re planning the third iteration. It will let us see how every breeding bird species in Ohio has changed in distribution, density, and overall population size.
Right now I’m helping the team get the project ready to launch in about a year and a half. Most of my work is data analysis. The last atlas had over a million records, and those were all paper records back then. This time we’re doing it through eBird, and we’re anticipating around a million records a year, so it has to be a solid database.
What did you study? We would love to learn about your academic path.
I went to school planning to become a history professor. I grew up as a birder, in the Ohio Young Birders Club, one of the first youth birding clubs in the United States. Back then there were only about a dozen of us; now there are hundreds. It’s wonderful to see how it’s grown. I thought: birding is my only hobby, so what if I go into professional ornithology and end up hating the job? Would I end up hating birding, too? So I went to school for history instead.
But I went to a liberal arts school, Denison University in Ohio, where you take classes across disciplines, which made it relatively easy to double major, so I also got a Bachelor’s in Biology. By that point I’d already been doing summer fieldwork, just because it was fun, not because I was planning to become a biologist. Then I got an NSF REU, a Research Experience for Undergraduates, to go to Kansas and work with grassland birds. I basically picked the first project that offered me a spot, and ended up planning a project so ambitious—looking at the spatial distribution of Grasshopper Sparrows—that they brought me back for a second year, and I still wasn’t done.
I wrote that up for my biology thesis, and I also wrote a history thesis on gender in late antiquity. Not exactly complementary projects. When it came time to choose a graduate program, I had to decide whether to continue with birds or with studying ancient history. I went with birds, mainly because I liked fieldwork more than library time, and because I’m bad at languages, which makes it hard to work from translations. So I went to Kansas for a master’s in biology, and worked on grassland birds for three years. Then I went to the University of Illinois to continue in biology. My PhD is officially in ecology, evolution, and conservation, though my master’s work leaned heavily ecological and my PhD leaned heavily evolutionary.
How did you become interested in bird conservation?
I was into birds from basically the moment I was born. My mom had bird feeders and bird books around the house, but my parents weren’t birders themselves. I was just really into it, and my parents had a philosophy of encouraging each of our interests. They just let us run with whatever we were into.
Around that time, the Ohio Young Birders Club had just started, advertised basically as “Do you like birds? We’ll take you to see cool birds.” I thought, great, I want to see rare birds I can’t find on my own. My parents were happy to carpool with people to go find birds—but it turned out to be a bit of a trap, because the club didn’t just take us out birding. They immediately started teaching us about conservation and got us working on real projects. There were times I was on conference calls with the state governor advocating for local conservation issues, or surveying new parks to build baseline data for conservation plans. They taught us that enjoying birds includes another side to it: you can’t just have a good time burning gas to go chase rare birds— you have to give back and work on conservation issues too.
Which Species Working Groups are you involved in?
I’m not involved in any R2R Species Working Groups— I’m new to R2R. During my master’s and PhD, I focused on individual variation in bird growth: small, hyper-specific data sets, like going out and measuring a Grasshopper Sparrow every other day until it fledges. For my PhD, I was deep in the physiology of bird growth, measuring hormones and eggs. I’d actually run away from conservation for a while, because I’d worked on conservation projects as a teenager and gotten really depressed about it. So I stepped away, and now I’m coming back to my roots with this project, which is upstream of conservation work.
Tell us something interesting you have learned about the species you work with.
When I study individual species, I think about them very much as individuals. Instead of comparing one species to another, I’ve always compared, say, one Grasshopper Sparrow to its own sibling. When I was looking at Robin development, I was comparing based on the order in which each egg was laid—an incredibly specific, tiny variation. We can’t think of a species as one homogeneous thing. We know this inherently about humans, but I’ve noticed that especially when comparing across a lot of species, people say, “oh, this species does this, this, and this”— but once you actually dive into studying just that one species, you see this beautiful internal variation. And that’s exactly what evolution acts on: variation within a species.
It’s hard to keep that in mind and scale it up for big conservation projects—remembering that these are all individuals, that you can’t assume one bird in one area represents the whole species, even though that’s often what happens in practice, because we don’t have the funding to study every population of a widespread species everywhere. But it matters to collect at least some baseline local data, to make sure that what you’re assuming from the literature actually applies to your particular population.
So it’s important to remember that populations aren’t homogeneous—we need to keep paying attention to local variation and local ecology, and to keep doing basic ecological research even as we work toward applied conservation goals, because that basic work helps us avoid making erroneous assumptions when we set applied species goals. It’s a little unsettling, honestly, because we don’t have the funding to study every population everywhere—but it matters to keep that in mind, so that when we make habitat management decisions, we understand it can be complicated, and that we need to get to know the local birds before making assumptions about them.
What gives you hope for the future of bird conservation?
Quite a few things. First, since I joined the Young Birders Club around 2008–2009, I’ve been birding long enough to watch the enthusiasm for birding grow. Even if it isn’t directly translating into conservation action yet, every year there seem to be more people who notice birds and more people who care. When I was a kid, birding was something I got made fun of for. Now, when I interact with students around the university, they think it’s cool—they ask how many birds I’ve seen and so on. It’s a big change from being mercilessly mocked for it.
Watching birding become so much more mainstream has been exciting, because I know firsthand that enjoying birds leads to caring about birds, which leads to seeking ways to conserve them. I see that play out in my community, where people who’d never noticed a bird five years ago are now getting involved in habitat restoration projects, or speaking up when birds are threatened by new development. So even if we’re losing support for conservation at some higher political levels right now, the groundswell of community support keeps growing.
Working with students always gives me hope too. I like teaching a lot, and I try to teach as often as I can, even though teaching is a lot of work. Interacting with students is genuinely rejuvenating for me and their enthusiasm helps me a lot when I get jaded. When I’m not teaching students, I do a lot of public outreach—going to local libraries, Audubon clubs, doing online webinars. There are almost always people in the audience who say, “I didn’t realize birds were facing this kind of threat—what can I do about it?”
Is there someone whose work has inspired you? Why?
Lately it’s been the unsung heroes of bird conservation in Ohio. These are the people who did the nitty-gritty work of bringing individual geese back into the state from Canada, and who are never on the front pages. Mostly government and state officials who have just been steadily accumulating more state-protected land. We’re seeing that especially now at the local county level, where as people age and no longer need their large properties, they could make a lot of money selling to developers—for housing developments that, frankly, people my age couldn’t afford anyway. Instead, there are dedicated local county officials who work to acquire that land as public parks instead, measurably improving community well-being in ways an expensive housing development wouldn’t.
I like that conservation isn’t always about one person as a hero on a pedestal—it’s a community of hardworking people who aren’t doing it for accolades, just grinding away at these small habitat patches until, collectively, you end up with a landscape that supports far more birds than it used to.
What is one lesson or message you would like to share with others in the R2R network?
I burned out on conservation work once already, and I’ve been working my way back in—I’m generally bad at work-life balance, so I end up burning out repeatedly and getting sick a lot. I have this voice in my head that says, “You can’t stop working—the birds need you, your colleagues need you, your citation index needs you,” and so on. But it’s important to remember that our own well-being matters, and that you can’t separate people from the science. You need to take care of yourself in order to take care of your projects, the people who rely on you, and the habitats and birds that rely on you.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my own wellness lately, and connecting that to wildlife—go outside and notice how much everything rests. Make an ethogram and watch, over the course of a day, how often organisms are resting. We should be resting too.