Announcing the 2024 Jerry Liguori Raptor Conservation and Education Scholarship Recipients

Sasha Chilibeck is a 5th-year Biology and Environmental Science student at Dalhousie University. She is originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on Treaty 6 Territory, where she grew up observing a wide range of birds—from soaring grassland raptors to wading shorebirds to boreal forest songbirds. This will be her third and final year acting as co-president of the Dalhousie Birding Society.

The Birding Society offers free and accessible opportunities for students to learn about birding and ornithology through workshops, guided trips, volunteer opportunities, and research seminars. Funding from the scholarship will support new raptor-specific opportunities for students. Specifically, funding will allow the Society to host lectures from a local falconer, wildlife rehabber, and some of HWI’s science staff. It will also support a hawkwatching trip to a migration site, and raptor ID lectures from HWI’s science staff.

Before Michael became the Executive Director of Soldiers2Scientists, he worked with Joint Force teams in Afghanistan and served as Strategic Analyst for the Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Command. His service, paired with his passion for the outdoors, is what brought him to found Soldiers2Scientists. Through outreach with national parks, national forests, and sentinel landscape installations around the country, his nonprofit identifies important priority research and conservation projects and develops enriching community science opportunities for the military community and general public.

With support from the scholarship, Michael will expand his efforts to build an American Kestrel nest box monitoring program throughout the US. Specifically, funding will help replace some of the very first nest boxes that kicked off this program. Michael and his team will also add a number of boxes in Manassas Battlefield Park and the Shenandoah National Park area in Virginia. He also plans to host an event to recruit more volunteers.

Gonzalo De León Girón is a professor and researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC), Mexico. Since 2014, he has been studying the ecology of the raptors in Baja California, including a stint as the director of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park, where he collaborated on a California Condor conservation project.

Since 2018, Gonzalo has been conducting research with UABC students on the diversity of owls in coniferous forests through their vocalizations, recording findings of species previously considered extinct in Baja California. Some of the owls they have recorded include Long-eared Owls, Spotted Owls, Northern Saw-whet Owls, and more! With support from the scholarship, Gonzalo plans to increase monitoring efforts of the owl community through automated recorders in the mesomediterranean bioclimatic zone of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. Funding will allow the team to add two more monitors to their collection of four and expand to more habitats within the research area. Additionally, he plans to produce a documentary film about the owls and his research to increase public awareness of these birds.