Bobcat Stories

Katia Chavez ‘22 is about to graduate from the University of Montana with degrees in Wildlife Biology and Spanish, a certificate in Global Leadership, and with Honors distinction having finished the course requirements through the Davidson Honors College. 

“My favorite memory from Bosque School was taking Mr. Shaw’s Wildlife Conservation Research class my senior year where I got the opportunity to conduct a year-long project studying the diet of the Mexican Spotted Owl. This experience has largely shaped my college trajectory and is the reason I was able to work for the Forest Service in Ruidoso for two summers in a row, gaining field experience that actively helped me prepare for graduate school. Studying the Mexican Spotted Owl also sparked my passion for birds, and I recently defended my senior thesis through the Wildlife Biology program addressing how false-positive detection rates in avian point-count surveys are influenced by the number of birds singing simultaneously and the direction their songs are emitted in relation to the observer. My research was just accepted for a presentation at the American Ornithological Society conference in Massachusetts this August.”

This summer, Katia will be working as a grassland songbird technician in Eastern Montana, working with many of the same species she studied for her thesis. She will then head back down to New Mexico to work with a habitat restoration crew until December. Katia plans to apply for graduate school to study avian conservation.