2009 Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua Program Leaders and Presenters

Karen Amstutz lives on the edge of Yosemite National Park with her husband and their three daughters. Like many creatures, Karen and her family undertake a seasonal migration upslope to Tuolumne Meadows where she works each summer as a seasonal Ranger-Naturalist. Karen earned her M.A. from Humboldt State University in Environmental Education, and studied Marine Biology and Human Development at UC Davis. She has been fortunate to have worked as a naturalist in beautiful places for most of 25 years. With her binoculars always around her neck, Karen has traveled extensively in Asia, Central America, and Europe looking for adventures and feathered life forms.

Charles Atkinson has taught writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for thirty years. He's the author of four volumes of poetry, three of which have won national awards. His poems appear regularly in literary magazines and anthologies around the country.

Don Banta was born in Bishop and has lived continuously in Lee Vining since 1932, when he was four years old. The Banta family owns the Lake View Lodge in Lee Vining. Don's father was an avid sportsman, teaching Don to hunt and fish in the Mono Basin at a young age. Don's love for and interest in wildlife is still going strong as evidenced by his involvement with the Lee Vining Canyon herd of Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep and the numerous nest boxes that Don has placed in the Mono Basin. Although Lee Vining doesn't have an "official" mayor, there is no doubt that most residents would vote for Don!

Ted Beedy has spent most of his life birding in the Sierra, including the Mono Basin. He authored the wildlife chapters of the Water Rights EIR for Mono Lake, and spent three years doing field work in the Mono Basin. He is currently co-authoring "Birds of the Sierra Nevada" with David Lukas, which will include color illustrations of 320 species by Keith Hansen. Ted received his Ph.D. in Zoology from UC Davis in 1982.

Peter Bergen was first introduced to Nature Awareness and Primitive Skills in 1987 and since then, he has been learning, practicing, and enthusiastically sharing these time tested skills and activities. He has enjoyed working with school and scouting groups, nature preserve docents, bass guitar players and others, in places like New Jersey's Pine Barrens, Tennessee's Rolling Hills, and Coastal California. Currently he is associated with Regenerative Design Nature Awareness (RDNA) and playing jazz guitar in Sonoma County, Ca.

Lynn De Freitas is the Executive Director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve and protect the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem through education, research, and advocacy. Lynn began her involvement with Friends shortly after its founding in 1994. She became President in 1996 until becoming Executive Director in 2002. Lynn is part educator, citizen advocate, convener of disparate parties, nonprofit organization leader and conservation activist. She has worked in this capacity as a full time volunteer. Prior to her affiliation with FRIENDS, she was a library media coordinator for 18 years in both public and private schools in the Salt Lake area. Lynn holds a B.S. in Biology from Montclair State College and an M. Ed in Educational Systems and Learning Resources from the University of Utah.

Chef Linda Dore began her cooking career at Roget's Restaurant (now Nevados) in Mammoth, and has worked in several other Mammoth restaurants including Nevados, The Matterhorn, and Anything Goes Café. She delighted Eastern Sierra visitors and locals alike with her talents as chef at The Mono Inn at Mono Lake for four years. She studied for eight years under a graduate of the Culinary Academy in San Francisco. She says, "I like to think that my diploma comes from 'Catastrophe Cooking 101A—out of the frying pan and into the fire'... that great school of experience!" Linda has been serving the Chautauqua's Friday night dinners since they began!

Jon Dunn was chief consultant to the five editions of the National Geographic Society's Field Guide to the Birds of North America. He was the associate editor of the Society's Complete Birds of North America. He has extensive knowledge of the identification and distribution of North American birds and has written articles on these subjects which have appeared in a wide variety of journals. He was co-author and the host of the two-video set Large and Small Gulls of North America in the Advanced Birding Video Series as well as co-author of Birds of Southern California as well as Status and Distribution of Warblers with Kimball Garrett. Jon is also on the California Bird Records Committee, the ABA Checklist Committee and the Committee on Classification and Nomenclature of the American Ornithologists' Union.

Margaret Eissler grew up spending winters in Santa Barbara and summers in Tuolumne Meadows where her parents were caretakers for the Sierra Club property at Soda Springs. Later she played flute with the Santa Barbara Symphony for eighteen years. The magnetic pull of Tuolumne drew her back in 1985 to work first with the Yosemite Association and then in 1987 the National Park Service, splitting her time between Tuolumne Meadows and Yosemite Valley. In 1992 she founded the Parsons Memorial Lodge Summer Series, an annual forum for the arts and sciences. She loves the Mono Basin and is excited to finally give her music walk here.

Santiago Escruceria is a Colombian-born American citizen residing in California for the past 30 years. He graduated with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and a minor in Environmental Studies from Sonoma State University in northern California. He has taught environmental education, in Spanish and English, for the past sixteen years, eleven of which he has spent with the Mono Lake Committee. At Mono Lake he manages an outdoor education program for Los Angeles inner-city youth. Santiago is an avid birder, leading bird walks in Colombia during the winter and walks for school groups and the public in the Mono Basin during the summer. He has been birding the America's since 1986.

Lisa Fields is the wildlife biologist for the Sierra District of California State Parks; she is in charge of wildlife management in parks extending from Plumas-Eureka State Park in the north to Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve in the south. Her main emphasis is on raptor management, which includes Osprey, Northern Goshawk, Bald Eagle, and California Spotted Owl. At Mono Lake, she has been leading the Osprey nest monitoring program since 2004.

Nancy Hadlock received her BS from the Universtiy of Nevada at Reno (UNR), her MS from California State University, Sacramento and has worked as an Interpretive Ranger for the National Park Service since 1982. She has participated in UNR's Basque Studies Program and has been a passionate student of Basque culture, history and stories for over 20 years.

Tom Hahn is a field biologist with bachelor's and master's degrees in Biology from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Washington. He's been studying crossbills, White-crowned Sparrows, and other songbirds all over the West since the mid-1980s, and has spent countless hours in the field around Tioga Pass. He enjoys observing animals in their natural habitats, sharing what he knows with fellow naturalists, and learning from his students. Tom is currently on the biology faculty at UC Davis, and lives in Davis with his wife Julie, and his six-year-old son Lyle. You can find out more about his research at www.npb.ucdavis.edu/npbdirectory/hahn.html.

John Harris began his interest in Mono's mammals while working as an undergraduate assistant in a study of chipmunks in 1975. He went on to study small mammals on Mono's dunes as a graduate student and has worked on small mammals in the Sierra Nevada and San Joaquin Valley of California. John is the author of Mammals of the Mono Lake-Tioga Pass Region and is currently teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Justin Hite is a field ornithologist who spent six years studying and living among the California Gulls of Mono Lake's rocky isles. He spent much of the last year and a half studying Tachycineta Swallows in South and Central America. He is fond of cutting up "Long Live Mono Lake" bumper stickers to make his own more profound statements, such as "Release Flamingos at Mono Lake." Justin's infectious enthusiasm for the birds of the Mono Basin will surely keep you entertained.

Debbie House is a watershed Resources Specialist for the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power in Bishop. She has a master's in Biological Sciences from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she conducted research in avian community ecology. She is conducting long-term monitoring studies at Mono Lake, Bridgeport reservoir, and Crowley Lake reservoir in order to evaluate the response of waterfowl and shorebird populations to increases in the elevation of Mono Lake.

Ann Howald was trained as a plant ecologist. She is a consulting botanist who also does volunteer work for the California Native Plant Society. She lives in Sonoma and spends some of each summer studying plants in the Eastern Sierra. Ann is a talented and inspiring teacher. She has been a popular MLC field seminar instructor for over ten years.

Quresh Latif received his B.S. in Wildlife Biology at UC Davis and is in the Ph.D. program at UC Riverside in the Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology. He has spent eight summers studying riparian songbird nesting ecology in the Mono Basin. Between undergrad and grad school, he began working at Mono Lake as a nest-searching intern for Sacha Heath and PRBO in 2001. He decided to pursue a graduate project collaborating with Sacha and exploring the importance of habitat and nest predation to breeding songbirds.

Burleigh Lockwood has been a field biologist since the age of four (smashed worms and crumpled caterpillars in inquisitive hands). She pursued biology through high school and into college. While she was finishing her degree in Environmental Biology, she began working for California Fish & Game as a seasonal biologist. It was a career shift to the Forest Service that brought her into contact with owls. As an official "hooter" on Spotted Owl surveys for the Forest Service, she learned the habits and hoots of the owls in the Sierra. She is currently a biologist for the Education Department of the Chafee Zoo in Fresno.

Jeff Maurer is currently a Wildlife Biologist in Yosemite National Park where his projects include raptor monitoring as well as the recovery of the mountain yellow-legged frog. Jeff received a master's in 2000 in the ecology of the Northern Goshawk in Yosemite from UC Davis, where he also researched lead poisoning in California Condors and the use of nest boxes by American Kestrels, and lectured on the interface between birds and agriculture. He has conducted surveys for Great Gray Owls and Peregrine Falcons in Yosemite, and hawk migration counts with HawkWatch International at various locations in North America. Jeff has also conducted bird surveys for PRBO Conservation Science in the Eastern Sierra and worked for the Inyo National Forest. Jeff has taught with the Sierra Institute and the Yosemite Association, and enjoys watching shorebirds in California's Central Valley at the magical spring puddles of water known as vernal pools—Mono Lake's smaller cousins.

Chris McCreedy has worked in the Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran, and Antarctic Deserts with PRBO Conservation Science since 1999, and in the Mono Basin since 2001. He enjoys ecology, illustration, writing, and talking to lizards and penguins. He coordinates PRBO's land bird projects in the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, and has been working on the Rush Creek Willow Flycatcher population since he found them nesting there in 2001.

Paul McFarland is the Executive Director for Friends of the Inyo (www.friendsoftheinyo.org), a local non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the Eastern Sierra's publicly-owned wildlands. He likes to think of birds as little dinosaurs, to eat anything organic, and to shop locally. Paul likes to paraphrase poet Gary Snyder— "Go light, stay long, learn the flowers."

Peter Metropulos has spent 20 years exploring and birding throughout Mono County and has an intimate knowledge of Mono Basin birds. He has served as one of the sub-regional editors of North American Birds magazine for over 25 years, and has co-authored several articles and bird-finding guides. Peter is a practicing horticulturist and is therefore able to identify and share with us many of the area's botanical wonders as well!

John (Jack) Muir Laws is a naturalist, educator and artist who delights in exploring the natural world and sharing his love for it with others. He has worked as an environmental educator for over 25 years in California, Wyoming, and Alaska. He teaches classes on natural history, conservation biology, scientific illustration, and field sketching. His most recent book, The Laws Guide to the Sierra Nevada, is a field guide to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals and is beautifully illustrated with 2,710 original watercolor paintings. This comprehensive and easy-to-use guide allows botanists to identify the insects that come to their flowers, birders to identify the trees in which the birds perch, or hikers to identify the stars overhead at night. Jack is trained as a wildlife biologist and is an associate of the California Academy of Sciences. In the summer of 2004, Jack published Sierra Birds: a Hiker's Guide. He is also a regular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with his "Naturalist's Notebook" column. He is currently coordinating efforts to create a curriculum to tie the field guide to the State of California education standards and secure funding to donate sets of field guides to every elementary and high school in the Sierra Nevada and teaching field sketching and natural history classes throughout the state. Visit www.johnmuirlaws.com for more on Jack's work.

Stella Moss came to the Mono Basin in 2005 to work for PRBO Conservation Science on Mono Lake's tributary streams. She has returned to the Eastern Sierra every season since and now leads PRBO's Eastern Sierra projects. Stella has a BA in Outdoor Experiential Education and Natural History from Prescott College. Her work with PRBO in the Eastern Sierra provides critical information on breeding songbirds in Sagebrush, Aspen, Pinyon Pine and Riparian habitats. The results of the research are used to guide land management decisions in the Eastern Sierra. Stella is grateful to call the Mono Basin her new home and is eager to further the understanding of bird conservation in this region.

Lisa Murphy is a seasonal ranger naturalist in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park. Her first foray into star programs was in 1993 assisting with a planetarium and observatory for 6th grade students at The Clemmie Gill School of Science and Conservation in Tulare County. Lisa is enchanted by the night sky, especially as seen from the open spaces in Yosemite's high country and the Mono Basin.

Kristie Nelson has had a love for birds since some of her earliest memories. She has conducted ornithological fieldwork throughout much of the state, serves on the California Bird Records Committee, and has been the project leader for the California Gull research at Mono Lake for several years. She lives in the Mono Basin and is very familiar with its assemblage of bird life. When not engaged in birding activities, she is busy running a small diversified farm with her husband Joel.

Alan Pollack, M.D., has been a long time member of the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy. After retiring from the practice of psychiatry in 1995, his interest in woodworking led him to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity for several years. For the past 12 years, he has been a volunteer with Wildlife Care of Ventura County, which rescues and rehabilitates injured or orphaned birds and small mammals. It was through them that he learned about the training given by the National Wildlife Federation to become a Wildlife Habitat Steward. Having been a life-long gardener and having a knack for landscape design, he was delighted to be able to wed two of his passions: the love of gardening and of wildlife. His yard immediately became certified as an official, wildlife habitat site and for the past 4 years, he has been giving free consultation and landscape designs to homeowners, churches, and schools, anyone who wishes to create a garden that is attractive to wildlife as well as humans. Two years ago, he was appointed to the Board of the San Fernando Valley Audubon Society and has been leading their Audubon-at-Home Project. He has been giving his PP slide show/lecture to various groups who are interested in the goal of preserving and restoring wildlife habitat.

Richard Potashin is a long-time Eastern Sierra resident and past Mono Lake Committee intern and canoe guide who has been discovering and documenting aspen carvings for the past six years. Today Richard works as a National Park Service ranger at Manzanar National Historic Site.

Bob Power is the Executive Director for Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society. Bob is a leader for the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory's HawkWatch program, and has been a field trip leader for Golden Gate Audubon, SFBBO, the Oakland Bird Club, The Wild Bird Center, and trip co-leader for Paradise Birding and Elder Hostel International. Bob has been the instructor for Introduction to Birding at Palo Alto Adult School for the past four years.

Sarah Rabkin is a writer, editor, visual artist, and keeper of illustrated field journals. She has led dozens of field workshops in beautiful settings around the American West, with a special focus on the Sierra Nevada and environs. A longtime teacher of writing and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Sarah has a BA in biology from Harvard University and a graduate certificate in science communication from UC Santa Cruz. She finds inspiration in landscapes, places, and the natural world, and enjoys helping others cultivate the power in their own voices and visions.

Ane Carla Rovetta's formal training was as a scientist. Like the painters during the Renaissance, she believes that science and art are kindred disciplines and has spent most of her adult life unifying the two in lively public performances throughout the West. Her specialty is combining storytelling with traditional yoga moves. Ane Carla is a certified I.Y.T. and Hatha Yoga teacher. Ane's "grounding" in natural history has led her to include the earth around her in her artwork. A pen and ink illustrator for over twenty years, Ane has illustrated five books and maintains a studio in Petaluma, California. She lives in Sonoma County where her pastel chalks are rolled in a "funky little outbuilding that used to be a chicken coop."

Alison Sheehey is the Outreach Coordinator for Audubon California's Kern River Preserve. Her deep appreciation of all things Kern began with her explorations of the desert environs of the Temblor Range, where she fell in love with the intricacies of the geology, flora and fauna in a place many regarded as an ugly wasteland.

Dave Shuford is a biologist with PRBO Conservation Science's Wetlands Ecology Division and has overseen research on California Gulls at Mono Lake since 1983. Dave has conducted breeding bird atlas projects in Marin County and the Glass Mountain region of Mono County. He has spent countless hours exploring the hinterlands of California and has a passion for understanding and adding to knowledge on the status and distribution of California's diverse avifauna. He regularly teaches classes with the Mono Lake Committee and with San Francisco State's Sierra Nevada Field Campus at Yuba Pass, and he looks forward to sharing his knowledge with you and learning from you as well.

Rich Stallcup is a wildlife biologist (specializing in birds) who has many years of field experience throughout Western North America including the Mono Basin and Sierra. A good friend of David Gaines and a Mono Lake warrior from the beginning, Rich has also been a senior tour leader and owner of WINGS, a teacher at Point Reyes Field Seminars, and author of several scientific papers and books like Ocean Birds of the Nearshore Pacific. Rich co-founded the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in the late 1960s, and now serves as a naturalist for PRBO Conservation Science.

Bob Steele is a professional bird photographer from Inyokern, California. He has been involved in birding and bird photography for over 20 years. Inyokern is in the bird-rich Kern County, an area centrally located at the convergence of multiple bio-regions, giving him the opportunity to photograph many avian subjects. He has also have traveled around the country and to Costa Rica and Australia to photograph species not available at home. Bob's photos can be seen in many publications including: Birding, Wild Bird, Birder's World, Ducks Unlimited, National Geographic Traveler, and National Wildlife magazines, multiple National Geographic field guides and books, the new Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds of North America, and the soon to be published American Museum of Natural History Birds of North America and Stokes photographic field guides for Birds of North America. Bob's work is featured at: www.bobsteelephoto.com .

Susan Steele's interest in birds began as a child in Idaho with evenings spent on the porch listening to meadowlarks. This interest blossomed into a passion when she moved to the California desert more than 20 years ago. An accomplished birder with many state and county records, she spends her free time birding, hiking, and enjoying the flowers in the eastern Sierra.

Erik Westerlund has worked as a naturalist in Yosemite since 1992. He received a bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and a master's in Natural Resource Management from University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He spends most of his free time studying the natural history of Yosemite's birds, plants, and insects, and is an avid observer of all that is beautiful.

Stuart Wilkinson is a long-time Mono Lake paddling guide and veteran kayaker. He and his wife Sue own and operate Caldera Kayaks, and have been operating on Mono Lake for about 15 years. When he's not kayaking Stuart assists with the monitoring of Long Valley Caldera for the US Geological Survey.

In the mid-1980s, naturalist and biologist David Wimpfheimer worked for the Mono Lake Committee accomplishing a variety of educational, lobbying, and promotional objectives. On eleven 350-mile fundraising Bike-A-Thons pedaling from Los Angeles to Mono Lake, he was known to peddle off-course to pursue birds. As a professional nature guide, David educates and interprets all aspects of the environment. For over twenty years, David has imparted much knowledge to private clients and for organizations, such as Point Reyes Field Seminars, Mono Lake Committee Field Seminars, SF Bay Whale Watching, Elder Hostel, various Audubon chapters; (visit www.calnaturalist.com). David's seasoned focus and knowledge make for an enjoyable and educational outing.

Rosalie Winard has spent the last 30 years enamored with wetland birds. While receiving her bachelor's degree in Natural History, specializing in ornithology and ethology, she conducted a field study on threat and greeting displays of the Brown Pelican in Robert's Bay, Sarasota, Florida. Receiving one of the first Student Originated Studies Grants, she worked for the National Science Foundation censusing bird populations all over Florida before careers in documentary film, video art and finally, photography. Winard's award-winning photographs have appeared worldwide in numerous publications including Audubon, OnEarth, Artforum, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and on 60 Minutes, BBC and PBS. Her pictures are in the collections of The Library of Congress, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Sacks, Terry Tempest Williams et al.

Ben Winger first came to Mono Lake in 2004 after his freshman year in college to study Tachycineta swallows in Lee Vining Canyon for Cornell University professor Dr. David Winkler. The Mono Basin was love at first sight, and naturally Ben could not resist returning to Lee Vining for each summer in college. In addition to Tree and Violet-green swallows, Ben has studied Wilson's Phalaropes on Mono Lake's remote eastern shore and has birded all corners of the Mono Basin. Since graduating college in 2007, Ben has divided his time between working as a field ornithologist in Ecuador and Peru and working in the bird research collections at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (his hometown institution) as well as the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Ben is ecstatic to return to Mono Lake this summer to work as a field biologist for PRBO before he begins a PhD program in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago in the fall.