Nicole Michel (IBP Alumna) Tel: (415) 663 2050 to enquire

I started off as an IBP intern way back in 1997. Back in those days, field jobs were a lot harder to come by. The "World Wide Web" was still new and mysterious to everyone but hard-core techies, so recent college grads such as me, looking for seasonal field positions mostly did so by word of mouth. I had spent the previous year working as an AmeriCorps intern with the Forest Service in Washington State and had just discovered birds, when my supervisor told me about this group that studied bird population trends and recommended I apply to be an intern the following summer. A few months I took off to Denali National Park in Alaska, where I met these two dudes who were mistnetting and banding birds for IBP, and I thought to myself "Wow, that sounds like the coolest job ever".

Flash forward to May 1997. Scene: 6 am in a freezing-cold meadow in Klamath Lakes, Oregon, where 6 interns are huddling around a dude named Zed with a northern flicker in his hand. Zed's calling out "ow" every few seconds, as the bird pile-drives its sharp beak into his hand. Sounds like heaven, right? But it was for me and for my fellow interns, many of whom also continue to work in the field of bird research and conservation. Finally, here were people who were not just *talking* about using research for the purpose of conservation, they were actually walking the walk! And we get to work in remote and gorgeous places with beautiful birds to boot! What could be better? Then Zed showed me photos from his recent trip to Costa Rica, including a photo of a bird called a royal flycatcher with a gorgeous orange-and-blue sideways-mohawk-like crest, and I decided then and there that I was going to Costa Rica someday, somehow.

I spent that summer camping out in Yosemite National Park while banding birds in beautiful montane meadows and dodging bears. I loved my first season so much that when Dave DeSante called to offer me a field biologist position for the next year, I immediately accepted, despite the fact that it was in a state that I had just announced, less than a month prior (after spending a long day in a truckstop with a broken-down truck), that I would never return to. I returned as a field biologist again in 1999, then that fall was hired on full-time. So off I went to beautiful Point Reyes Station, where I got to see what went on behind the scenes. I learned a tremendous amount in my time at IBP: data verification and analysis, database programming, GIS analysis, report-writing, and programming and support of MAPSPROG, the stand-alone MAPS data entry and verification program. But after 5 years I realized I was ready to move on - I wanted to be a senior researcher myself - so off I went to graduate school to learn new skills and get my PhD. But I had a few months to kill, and I realized that I'd never fulfilled my dream of going to Costa Rica to find the royal flycatcher, so I contacted the project manager and off I went to Tortuguero a few months later.

Well, I never did find the royal flycatcher on that trip. But that trip changed my life, as I immediately fell in love with the tropics and with tropical resident birds, and I learned about the challenges facing many species - deforestation, fragmentation, pesticides, climate change, etc. When I returned to the States and to Tulane University, where I'm working with Dr. Thomas Sherry, I switched my dissertation topic from a temperate to a tropical focus. Today, I'm in the fourth year of my dissertation research, investigating mechanisms and consequences and declines of rainforest understory insectivorous birds in Central America. I'm currently in the middle of a 1.5 year (and hopefully longer) field season in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, where - although I do not yet have sufficient data to make a conclusive statement - I believe I've found a potential mechanism driving the dramatic post-fragmentation declines that have been found in this group of birds throughout the tropics. I'm still using research to promote conservation - something that my time at IBP showed me is both possible and necessary.

...and no, I still haven't found that royal flycatcher, so back to the forest I go…

Selected Publications:

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