An avid birder since 2015, Fiona is a six-time recipient of the Central Valley Birding Club Youth Scholarship, enabling her to attend summer birding camps to further develop her skill and passion in birding. She especially enjoys the music of birdsong and she loves to bird by ear. Since 2016, she has attended San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Field Campus: Bird Identification by Song (adult course), Institute for Bird Populations Advanced Bird Banding Course at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center (adult class), Camp Chiricahua, Camp Cascades, Hog Island Audubon Camp: Coastal Maine Bird Studies for Teens, and Hog Island Audubon Camp: Arts and Birding (adult class).
In June 2020, Birding, the American Birding Association's national monthly magazine, published Fiona's 7-page article, “A Birder's Brain on Paper: How keeping a nature journal improves our birding experiences.” The piece included several pages from Fiona's journals. Read a PDF of the article. Since Fall 2018, Fiona has been a volunteer with Gold Country Avian Studies in Grass Valley, where she has been thrilled to learned how to extract and band birds. Her bird banding training includes years of supervision by experienced mentors as well as the week-long intensive Advanced Bird Banding Course at Wolf Ridge with IBP's Danielle Kaschube in 2021 (read an essay by Fiona about that experience). In the summers of 2022 and 2023, Fiona was a volunteer bird bander with the Institute for Bird Populations MAPS bird banding crew in Yosemite National Park. Fiona has volunteered her time giving talks and teaching classes to many groups and organizations about her passion for birding, drawing birds, and nature journaling (see Talks & Teaching). Since 2017, Fiona has volunteered her time as a participant and a leader for local Christmas Bird Counts, spending long, full days during her winter school breaks counting birds with a team. Fiona has volunteered as a leader and co-leader of bird walks for local groups and non-profits, including Placer Land Trust, Sacramento Waldorf School, the Sierra Foothills Audubon Society, and a local Girl Scout troupe. In February 2019, with the help of some local birding mentors and donors, Fiona installed 22 bluebird boxes in her neighborhood, which is a wildland-urban interface, and she monitors them for the California Bluebird Recovery Program. |
Birding Magazine, the national monthly magazine of the American Birding Association, published Fiona's 7-page article, “A Birder's Brain on Paper: How keeping a nature journal improves our birding experiences.” Click the image to read.
GALLERY OF NATURE JOURNAL PAGES See examples from the more than 2,000 nature journal pages that Fiona has created since she began journaling in 2016, many of which include birds. Fiona is also an Artist who especially enjoys drawing birds. |