Mono Lake memories of Jeff

Jeff taking in Virginia Canyon.



I first met Jeff at Mono Lake in 2003. He was a member of a big group of bird nerds who were helping me and PRBO document riparian breeding songbirds along a long stretch of the Eastern Sierra that summer. Typically these crews are filled by field assistants with maybe one or two seasons under their belt. You all know Jeff well enough to know that by 2003 he'd certainly been around the bird block. So I remember being a little nervous – here was a UC Davis professor with endless other experiences taking a summer break to help me and a bunch of twenty-somethin's count birds. But when he rolled up to our Mono City prefab in his old blue Subaru, there were honey jars, frisbees, a dulcimer, binoculars, maybe even a pair of skis, and his trusty old milk crate full of various grains and beans and eggs and whatever veggies he had pulled before leaving Davis scattered throughout. And that big mop of hair and … that smile. I thought, “yeh, this is going to work out.”

What an understatement. I couldn't have asked for a more humble, knowledgeable, joyful, grounded, competent or curious person to work with. He would go on week-long roves, observing and recording warblers, vireos, woodpeckers, pewees, hummingbirds (mere snacks for his raptor friends) and then he'd roll back into town to share his adventures and cool observations.


Jeff became a friend. And I was lucky enough to be able to keep working with him in the summers to come and to share a couple Mono Basin winters in between. When I read his friends' memories here and elsewhere and think of our own adventures, I wonder if Jeff ever slept. He was a sinewy denizen of the mountains brimming with energy and adventure and curiosity. A proselytizer of all things wild – but no mere evangelical, this man literally put frogs back in lakes and birds back on walls. And yet somehow in all of this bubbling energy, there was calm and humility and gentleness and straight talk. Like Gary Snyder's “real work”, he knew what had to be done.


I miss him very much.


My biggest sympathies to Jeff's family and partner and large network of friends.