Featured Scientist

Mia holding a federally endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard (Gambelia sila), helping environmental scientist counterparts from Region 4 with their annual population surveys in West Kern County.


Mia handling San Joaquin kit fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica) in Bakersfield.


In an effort to control a mange outbreak affecting the kit fox population in Bakersfield, Mia and other scientists were providing a helping hand to do some wellness checks for individual animals.

Mia Roberts is an environmental scientist for CDFW’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR). She is part of the Fairfield-based field response team, tasked with responding to oil spills throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She previously worked on the response team in Bakersfield.

Mia began her career with the department as a scientific aid working on the Delta Smelt and Coastal Pelagic Species programs. She then served a brief stint in the private sector, working as a scientist for an environmental consulting firm that specialized in electrical transmission projects. She returned to the department in her current role at OSPR about three years ago.

Mia earned a bachelor’s degree in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and has diverse professional experience in natural resources management and environmental compliance. She is also a fluent Spanish speaker after spending time studying abroad in Costa Rica.

Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?

My inspiration to pursue a career in natural resources protection came from my mother. She taught me to care for the environment around me, even if that meant picking up one piece of trash a day. She encouraged outdoor play, and many of our family outings were spent outdoors. In addition to my mother, Jane Goodall was (and still is) a powerful role model for me.

What got you interested in working with CDFW?

Not everyone is lucky enough to know what they want to “be” when they grow up, but I had a general idea of what I wanted to do since I was very young, which was to protect animals. My career goals evolved and matured over time as I accumulated professional and life experience, but my core interests have always stayed the same – speaking for the voiceless.

I have worked in private industry, the federal government and in non-profit organizations, but my favorite and most fulfilling work experiences have always been with CDFW. The work I have done, and continue to do, has always aligned with my childhood aspirations of protecting the natural world. I work alongside some amazing people at CDFW, and I have learned so much from them along the way. I hope to continue learning as much as possible with the department while simultaneously contributing to the protection of our state’s beautiful and unique natural resources for future generations.

What is a typical day like for you at work?

Being on the Northern Field Response Team means we are some of the first people on scene during an oil spill. My schedule could be full of oil spill drills, contingency planning and training activities, but it could all be dropped if the team has to respond to an oil spill. I love having a profession where I never know what my day is going to look like, because it keeps me on my toes and I never get bored.

I love working with a team to solve a problem, and being part of the response team provides endless opportunities to do that. Every spill we respond to is different and comes with its own challenges. Our main goal as the field response team is to safely clean up oil spills while causing the least environmental harm. I very much enjoy working with my fellow responders to accomplish that goal.

Over the course of your career, was there a discovery or an incident that surprised you?

My time with OSPR has been full of surprises, but the biggest one so far was learning about the history of oil in California. I had no idea that California played such a large role in oil production for the nation. Seeing the extensive Central California oil fields was a huge eye-opener, and it felt like I was on a whole new planet that I did not know existed. Here was black, sticky oil literally oozing out of the ground from natural seeps! The same seeps that created the tar-pit-death-traps for countless prehistoric creatures! How did I miss this my whole life?

If you had free reign and unlimited funding, what scientific project would you most like to take on?

I would love to train an oil detection dog to aid with oil spill response. Dogs are amazing creatures and can perform many tasks that could benefit the spill response community. Their capacity for scent detection and differentiation could really change the way we respond to oil spills in the state, and the department already has a wonderful infrastructure to support this type of project.

Do you have any advice for people considering careers in science or natural resources?

Get as much experience early on as you possibly can! The competition for entry-level natural resources and science jobs can be fierce, and oftentimes it is that little bit of volunteer time you had at that lab, or the summer you spent doing field work banding birds that can make all the difference.

The field of science is extremely broad, so I would recommend trying to identify the specific job you would like to do and spend your time gaining experience relevant to that position. During college, I spent a lot of my undergraduate time as a research assistant on various research projects, working for graduate students and research labs on campus. These jobs can provide you with the hands-on experience employers look for when hiring for entry-level positions.

###

CDFW Photos courtesy of Mia Roberts. Top Photo: Mia Roberts helping perform kangaroo rat surveys in West Kern County with our fellow environmental scientists from Region 4. The animal she is holding is a federally endangered giant kangaroo rat (Dipodomys ingens).

Backpacking remains one of Evan’s outdoor passions – along with gardening, fishing and hunting. He’s pictured here in 2016 near Bishop Pass on the southeast side of the Sierra.


Evan King shows off a lingcod he caught last year off of Morro Bay.


Evan, his wife, Renee, and their dog Madison hike in the Mineral King area within Sequoia National Park.
 

Since 2010, Evan King has been CDFW’s wildlife biologist for Kings and Tulare counties. He is based in Visalia, just about two hours south of where he grew up. Born in Turlock and raised in Denair, Evan King is a third-generation biologist. His grandfather, Frank H. King, worked for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and his father, Holman E. King, spent more than 30 years as a wildlife biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game assigned to Stanislaus County.

Evan got an early education in Central Valley wildlife as he often accompanied his dad on deer and waterfowl surveys and human-wildlife conflicts. He later earned a degree in wildlife management from Humboldt State University.

Given your family background, was it inevitable that you would one day work for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife?

My dad encouraged me to go to Humboldt State because a lot of people he worked with at the department also went to Humboldt and because wildlife always has been something I was interested in. But getting a job with the department wasn’t necessarily a goal or a push or anything. It just happened to be the right fit for me.

How did you come to work for CDFW, then?

When I graduated from Humboldt, some roommates and I attempted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. I did all of California – the whole state, just shy of 1,600 miles in over 100 days. Thirty miles from the Oregon border, I got word of a scientific aid job opening with the Wildlife Investigations Lab near Sacramento. A friend of mine worked there and had put in a good word. I didn’t have a huge plan about what I was going to do after the hike so I dropped off the trail and took the job working for Dr. Pam Swift in the lab.

Four months after that, I got hired permanently as a biologist at the Mendota Wildlife Area. Full-time positions were hard to find back then, and as far as I was concerned it was a dream job for me at the age of 25. It was a permanent job with good pay and was an hour and a half away from where I grew up. I could go home on weekends and spend time with my family.

How long did you work at Mendota?

About four years. I was there from 2006 to 2010. I was in charge of all the water for the 13,000 acres of property. I did raptor surveys, breeding waterfowl pair surveys, duck banding, pheasant counts. I talked to all the hunters. I also learned how to repair irrigation problems, fix damage caused by beavers, and maintain flood control structures. It was a great place to cut your teeth as a biologist. Plus, I lived on the property and got to have my dog with me all the time. I hunted all the time. Life was good.

Many Californians have never visited Kings or Tulare County. What can you tell us about those places?

Kings County is mostly agricultural. Central Valley agriculture dominates the landscape and there are a lot of dairies. We’ve got some sensitive species there – tricolored blackbirds and San Joaquin kit foxes. Swainson’s hawks migrate from Argentina to spend their summers in Kings County. It’s more diverse than most people think.

Tulare County is pretty amazing. There are two national parks, a national forest and three wilderness areas all within the county. We’ve got Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, the Sequoia National Forest and parts of the Golden Trout Wilderness and South Sierra Wilderness. It encompasses the crest of the Sierra. If I were to drive from one end of Tulare County to the other, it would take me several hours.

What do you like best about your job?

I like the diversity. One day I am out darting a bear that’s in a backyard and the next day I’m checking for signs of porcupine in the national forest. One day  I could be writing a report and another day I could be out trapping nutria. I’m about to learn how to be a drone pilot. So it’s a lot of fun, and I get to use a lot of different skills.

There are people who volunteer and take time off of their work to come and do my job – to help on deer surveys or band doves or whatever the project might be that needs extra hands. For the past 10 years, I haven’t felt like I’ve gone to work at all. I enjoy it so much. It’s not just a job. It’s a big part of who I am.

We don’t hear much about porcupines. What’s happening with porcupines?

There’s a statewide study taking place. We’re trying to develop a technique to detect porcupines without using cameras. Porcupines are salt-driven. They want salt, need salt in their diet. So if we take a stick that is really salty and put it out there in the forest, will a porcupine be drawn to it and, if so, will they chew on it? If they do chew on it, are the chew marks distinctive enough to positively identify the animal as a porcupine or do we need to use a trail camera? Trail cameras are expensive. I can put out a thousand salty sticks – but not a thousand trail cameras.

So how are porcupines doing?

Well, it’s concerning since I haven’t detected one yet. We have biologists in Tuolumne, Madera and Fresno counties that are helping me with this project who haven’t detected them either. Porcupines once were quite common in our forests and now we never see them. They’ve had detections in Yosemite so at least we know they are up there. We are trying to detect them over an area that includes three national forests so there is a lot of ground to cover, but I am hopeful that we will find one eventually.

You were among the first wildlife biologists in the state assigned to the nutria eradication effort. What’s one message you’d like to share about nutria?

I think people just need to know the potential destructiveness. Nutria have the potential to destroy what is left of our native habitat – the very small amount of wetlands we have left that millions of waterfowl and other native species rely on. To have an animal that is not native potentially destroy our native habitat and make it disappear – people need to know that impact. People need to understand how important it is to identify nutria and let us know where they are. 

Tell us something about yourself people would be surprised to learn.

I met my wife, Renee, banding doves and we got married on the property where I still band doves. I was living on the same street as I do now in Visalia. I needed a place to band doves, and 500 yards down the street was her parents’ property. Their son is a biologist, and I asked them if I could use their property, put out some traps. I got to know the family. They invited me to dinner, and I met Renee. We got married in May.

Photos courtesy of Evan King. Top Photo: Surveying local deer and elk populations is a routine part of Evan’s responsibilities. Here he collects vital statistics from a tule elk near the San Luis Reservoir in Merced County.

One of several burned trail cameras Martinelli lost in the Knoxville Wildlife Area as a result of the County Fire in July 2018.


Martinelli on the bagpipes


Martinelli holds a kingsnake from the Santa Rosa Plain Vernal Pool Ecological Reserve in Sonoma County

Stacy Martinelli is CDFW’s wine country wildlife biologist. An environmental scientist based in Santa Rosa, Stacy is assigned to Napa and Sonoma counties where she has worked the past 10 years conducting wildlife research, resolving human-wildlife conflicts and helping manage CDFW’s properties.

Stacy was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She earned an undergraduate degree in wildlife management from Montreal’s McGill University and a master’s degree in wildlife ecology, also from McGill. For her graduate research, she studied black ducks in Nova Scotia, one of Canada’s Maritime provinces on the Atlantic Coast.

What brought you to the United States?

Work – like every immigrant. I just couldn’t find work in Canada so I answered an ad in an ornithological newsletter looking for help on a waterfowl research project down in Los Banos. I was like, “I’ll do that. That’ll be fun. I’ll just start building my résumé.” It was a six-month contract helping a graduate student from the University of Missouri with some research. The project ended and I thought, “I like California.” That was in 1995.

How did you get to CDFW?

After Los Banos, somebody knew somebody that needed a biologist for the Suisun Resource Conservation District (SRCD) in the Suisun Marsh. I spent three years in that job. I lived out in the barracks on Grizzly Island alongside CDFW employees. It was really a lot of fun. At SRCD, we worked closely with the department as well. So I knew people and how the department worked and I thought I would love to work for the department. I applied for a Habitat Conservation Program job in San Diego in 1988 and spent a year down there as an environmental scientist reviewing projects and issuing permits. I got a transfer and promotion to our Bay Delta Region and worked in our Timberland Conservation Program until 2008 when I got my current job.

What’s kept you in this job for the past decade?

It’s such a great job. I am so thankful for this job. It’s so variable. It’s a good mix of field work, research and monitoring. There’s a lot of hands-on work. Sonoma and Napa counties are really exceptional because there is just high biodiversity here and there is still a lot of open space. I am a little worried about the housing crunch and all the talk to build more housing but there’s still a lot of great wildlife habitat that’s out here. We’ve got the coast in Sonoma. In Napa, we’ve got the beautiful east side with the Knoxville Wildlife Area that’s still pristine. And even here on the west side of Santa Rosa, we’ve got (endangered) tiger salamanders. We’ve got neighbors around them, but they’re still here and that’s really cool. We’re trying to do everything we can to make sure they don’t disappear.

Last October, this region experienced some of the most devastating wildfires in U.S. history. You’ve had more fires this year. What’s been the impact to wildlife?

There was high mortality for sure, especially with the Tubbs Fire last year, which burned so quickly. The species that live here – bobcat, coyote, gray fox, blacktail deer – they’re fairly resilient and adaptable. I don’t worry about them on a population level. They are going to be fine.

I am working on two projects right now looking at fire effects. One of those is in the Knoxville Wildlife Area. This is year three of a camera trap study. It’s a way of measuring the wildlife community with cameras in terms of abundance and presence of different species and the balance among those species.

I’ve got 23 trail cameras spread out there in a grid pattern about a kilometer apart. I’ve got half of my cameras on the west side of the wildlife area and half of my cameras on the east side. The east side burned in July in the County Fire and I lost a bunch of cameras. They just melted. But some survived and I’ve got photos of the flames and the smoke and everything.

The cool thing is I have three years of baseline data so I know what the wildlife community looks like pre-fire and now we get to see what the wildlife community looks like post-fire. We actually talked to Cal Fire at one point about doing a prescribed burn to study this exact thing, and now 6,000 acres are gone as a result of the County Fire.

My hope is that we see a rejuvenation of the chaparral community because that stuff just gets super woody. Deer browse those shrub species and as they age and become woody, they lose their nutritional value. All the new growth is going to provide a wonderful new food source for them. I’m pretty excited about the whole thing.

It sounds like the Knoxville Wildlife Area is a pretty special place.

It’s a very important piece of property. I’m so lucky I get to work on it. It’s huge. It’s 22,000 acres of mostly oak woodlands and grasslands with the chaparral component. There’s not a lot of other public hunting land around here. If you’re a Bay Area resident, Knoxville is the closest place to hunt deer.

The funny thing is when I first started working there I was like, “OK, nothing lives here.” I never saw any wildlife. Maybe I would see a deer or two by the side of the road but even when I explored the backcountry, I never saw much of anything. It was like a dead zone. What lives here? I have no idea.

But we’ve found all kinds of wildlife with our camera study. We found bears, which I thought was cool. We knew there were mountain lions, but we wanted documentation. There are more deer there than I thought. We never used to see bucks. But then I got some cameras up in the high elevations, the mostly inaccessible areas and it was like, “Aha! I know where you are now!” We saw badger. We found roadrunner. We found spotted skunk. These are all species that would be really tough to see in the field. So it’s been really exciting.

Is there a particular project you’ve worked on over your career that you’re especially proud of?

I’m not sure I’ve done that signature project yet. To me, land conservation is the biggest contribution that I think I can make and we as a department can make. They’re just not making any more land. If we don’t get the land, there’s always the risk of development. I’m pretty passionate about land conservation for wildlife. So I’m waiting for that opportunity to be part of locking up a piece of land for the wildlife community – and for the public, too.

What advice would you give a young person thinking about a career in natural resources?

I think the best thing is to do as much field work as you possibly can – especially during your undergraduate studies. Volunteer. Get an internship. Just be active in the wildlife community as best you can.

We have students call us quite often and we hire a bunch of scientific aides. I’ve done a lot of interviews and looked at a lot of résumés. Unfortunately, we see people who have graduated from college without a stitch of field experience. They’ve not done one thing. Start padding your résumé and just be prepared the next couple of years to travel around and do field projects throughout the state, throughout the country, throughout the world. Eventually you will get there. But be patient because you have to suffer some horrible pay and eating Top Ramen for a while before you can latch onto something permanent.

Tell us something about yourself people would be surprised to learn.

I play bagpipes in a bagpipe band. I play with the Macintosh Pipe Band in Larkspur, Marin County, and I go down and practice every week. We compete in the Bay Area, Monterey, and have played across the U.S., Scotland and Mexico. I learned how to play in Canada and I’ve stuck with it ever since. It’s a passion of mine.

Photos courtesy of Stacy Martinelli. Top Photo: Martinelli searches Mount St. Helena in Napa County for deer fecal pellets as part of CDFW’s statewide deer population survey, which extracts DNA information from the pellets.