We may be a small Audubon chapter but we are serious supporters of conservation science. For 2022, our Scientific Grants Committee funded the following projects in the amount of $36,182, thanks to generous donations from our membership. Here’s a quick summary of each project we funded.
Institute for Bird Populations: Tracking Great Gray Owls to advise habitat management in Yosemite National Park.
This project will tag and track Great Gray Owls in Yosemite National Park to improve foraging habitat and to make roadsides less attractive to the owls, thereby reducing vehicle collisions. Great Gray Owls nesting in the Sierra Nevada constitute a putative subspecies (S. n. yosemitensis) that is isolated from the rest of the North American population and likely comprises fewer than 100 breeding pairs. It is listed in the California Endangered Species Act as SENSITIVE.
Project Leader: Ramiro Aragon
Institute for Bird Populations: Surveying birds for pre- and post-restoration monitoring at meadows in and near the Little Truckee River watershed.
These meadows are a mix of sites that have been recently restored, are in the planning phase to be restored, or are for now serving as controls that will help evaluate the effects of restoration at the restored sites. This is a multi-year effort to 1) establish pre-restoration metrics of meadow bird communities prior to restoration, 2) use pre-restoration data to advise on bird-friendly restoration design elements, and 3) monitor post-restoration bird communities to learn lessons for better meadow restoration.
Project Leader: Helen Loffland
Institute for Bird Populations: Understanding molt patterns and improving age determination criteria in Williamson’s and other sapsuckers to aid conservation.

Female Williamson’s Sapsucker
Project Leader: Peter Pyle
San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory: Color Banding Western Snowy Plovers to Assess Survival and Dispersal Patterns in the South San Francisco Bay Area.

Color banded Snowy Plover
Project Leader: Ben Pearl
Dr. Robert Meese for research on Tricolored Blackbirds and funding for maintenance of the Tricolored Blackbird portal.

Tricolored Blackbird male in flight