I provide a summary of my professional history in the CV link to the left.  Below, I provide information about my background as it relates to that history and to my current interest in discussing the implications that follow directly from my fire science research. 

     I was born in LA and raised in a suburb that was a stone's throw from the chaparral-covered San Gabriel Mountains.  My undergraduate experiences in field biology cemented my interest in pursuing a career that would involve field ecology and keep me in the outdoors.  I studied how desert kangaroo rats and mice coexisted for my M.S. before homing in on birds as a tool for ecological studies that I conducted for my Ph.D. work at UCLA.  Then, and early in my academic career as a faculty member at the University of Montana, I continued to study how migratory landbirds fit into the west-Mexican ecosystem during winter.  It was the Yellowstone fires of 1988, however, that prompted me to shift my research attention toward understanding the relationship between birds and burned forests.  Results of that research have driven me to create this website. 

     Birds have a lot to tell us about land stewardship; all we need to do is listen!