David Shuford

Research Associate

From 1983 to 2018 Dave worked for Point Blue Conservation Science, retiring in 2019 as a Senior Scientist in the Pacific Coast and Central Valley Group. His research focuses on the status, habitat use, and conservation needs of waterbirds in California and the western United States. Dave is an expert in the status, distribution, and habitat associations of birds in California. He has extensive knowledge of the state’s breeding avifauna via breeding bird atlas projects in Marin County and the Glass Mountain region of Mono County. He has over 30 years of field experience in California with an emphasis on surveys of breeding and non-breeding waterbirds; field experience also from work throughout much of the West and from Alaska to Antarctica.

Some of Dave’s projects include: research on the ecology and reproductive biology of California Gulls at Mono Lake, California; statewide surveys of various species of colonial and semi-colonial waterbirds in California; documentation of the importance of wetlands throughout the West to shorebirds via the Pacific Flyway Project; broad-scale and local surveys of Snowy Plovers throughout California; reconnaissance surveys of the abundance, distribution, annual phenology, and broad-scale habitat associations of waterbirds at the Salton Sea, California, and the Klamath Basin, California/Oregon; coordination of the update of California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s list of Bird Species of Special Concern; preparation for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of status assessments of the Black Tern and Caspian Tern in North America; co-editing a monograph of collected papers on the Ecology and Conservation of Birds of the Salton Sink; studies of waterbird use of various crops and crop treatments in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta of California; conservation planning for waterbirds in the Central Valley and California as a whole, and co-editing a monograph on avifaunal change in western North America.

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