Thesis

Assessing multiple measures of nest site quality and intrinsic quality of barn owls (Tyto furcata)

About Me

I was born and raised in California’s Central Valley, more specifically Fresno, which is known for its intensive agriculture. The Southern Sierra Nevada served as my nearby escape during the earlier years of my young adult life. These formative experiences inspired my desire to work toward dispelling the illusionary gap between humans and the natural world. While working on my undergraduate degree at Cal Poly Humboldt, I spent my summers doing survey work for California spotted owls, great gray owls, goshawks, and osprey in the Sierra National Forest. As an undergrad at Humboldt, I studied barn owl nest box selection in the Central Valley and graduated with a B.S. in Wildlife Management and Conservation in 2020. Shortly thereafter, I went on to pursue a master’s degree as part of Humboldt’s Barn Owl Research Team. As a team, our goal is to emphasize the importance of native, uncultivated land within working landscapes as well as to highlight the reciprocal relationships between wildlife and people in these agricultural ecosystems. To further this collective goal, I will be evaluating multiple measures of breeding habitat quality and intrinsic quality of barn owls occupying winegrape vineyards in Napa Valley, California. I will also be examining the hypothesis of adaptive-breeding habitat selection to determine if the nest boxes selected by barn owls confer increased fitness. Unsurprisingly, I spend a lot of my free time birding, photographing wildlife, and hiking.

Undergraduate Institution

Cal Poly Humboldt