Awardee: Kelsey Reckling
Bio:
Kelsey Reckling is a second year PhD Student in the Tingley Lab at UCLA. She primarily studies bird migration in the Western United States, but has also worked on various other projects studying the evolution of birds using museum specimens, a 100- year Mexican bird resurvey project, wildlife connectivity in LA County, and prickly pear cactuses in the Galápagos. She has led a migration monitoring project in the San Gabriel Mountains at a site called Bear Divide for five years, and has interest in expanding her bird migration research to other mountain passes in Southern California.
Project:
Bird migration in the Western United States has been relatively understudied in comparison to the Central and Eastern parts of the U.S. Kelsey Reckling has led a bird migration monitoring project in the San Gabriel Mountains in LA County for the past five years and wants to expand her research to the Santa Monica Mountains. In this project, she wants to set up three stations at Stunt Ranch that contain audio recording devices and Motus antennas which can detect any tagged birds within a 10km radius to further identify migratory timing, species assemblages, and abundance while also bolstering the flight call directory for western songbirds. This project can help identify more migratory corridors in the mountains of Southern California and allows us to see how birds are navigating complex topographic landscapes.