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Mar. 28--Monica Tomosy has spent more than two decades building a career that has her perched atop the bird conservation world.
Tomosy, a native of South Whitehall Township, is chief of the U.S. Geological Survey's Bird Banding Laboratory at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md. The lab oversees thousands of researchers studying bird movements throughout North America and serves as a clearinghouse for more than 66 million pieces of banding data collected over nearly 100 years.
Ornithologists consider such data vital, since banding studies have revealed much of what modern science knows about migratory bird movement and behavior, which is key to protecting them.
Tomosy's job at the banding lab, where she oversees a staff of 24 people, is just the latest stop in an impressive career that includes nearly two decades as a federal wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Geological Survey.
She has also studied endangered parrots in Puerto Rico, surveyed spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest, monitored waterfowl at the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge in California and taught federal workers at the National Conservation Training Center in West Virginia.
Despite such impressive accomplishments, Tomosy said her passion for the outdoors and environmental conservation was shaped right here in the Lehigh Valley region, where she attended Parkland High School, completed an internship at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and earned a biology degree from Kutztown University.
Humble beginnings
Tomosy, 44, grew up in a modest home between Dorneyville and Wescosville. She was the youngest of five daughters born to her parents, Geza and Maria Tomosy of Lower Macungie Township, who emigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1956.
Although neither of her parents could be described as hard-core outdoor enthusiasts, Tomosy said they were instrumental in developing her appreciation for nature at an early age. Tomosy vividly recalls her mother's enjoyment of bird watching and said her childhood included many outings to feed the ducks at Trexler and Muhlenberg parks. Her dad, who has a deep appreciation for the order of the universe, gave her a microscope when she was 7 years old.
"My father really pointed out to me how fascinating and intelligent nature is," Tomosy said.
Later, Tomosy's interest in the environment was nurtured and encouraged by biology teachers at Parkland High School, where she graduated in 1979, and professors at Kutztown University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1983.
But Tomosy's first truly significant conservation experience came in 1982, when she served as an Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a nationally-renowned raptor conservation organization near Kempton.
It was there, Tomosy said, that she first got her feet wet in conservation biology by counting migrating raptors from the mountain's North Lookout and learning to identify various species just by their flight patterns and distant silhouettes.
It was at Hawk Mountain that Tomosy saw her first kettle of broadwing hawks, marveled at a hunting Cooper's hawk gliding silently through forest and watched in awe as a bald eagle soared so low over the mountain that she could see the color of its eyes.
Tomosy also got her first formal training as a nature interpreter at Hawk Mountain and practiced her new skills by working with school groups and other sanctuary visitors.
"It was a great steppingstone for the next jobs," she said.
The Hawk Mountain internship also solidified Tomosy's resolve to pursue a conservation career by allowing her to work and develop friendships with other people who shared the same passion.
One such person was Scott Weidensaul, a volunteer who helped run the sanctuary's banding program. Weidensaul has since become an award-winning outdoor writer and noted conservationist who actively bands owls and hummingbirds near his Schuylkill County home.
Obviously, Weidensaul said, it would have been impossible to know at the time how successful Tomosy would become. However, he said her commitment, keen intellect and excellent listening skills were evident even then.
"With hindsight, I guess you could trace a lot of what turned out to be strengths in Monica's professional career to the training she got at Hawk Mountain," said Weidensaul, who now sits on the sanctuary's board.
Building a resume
By the time Tomosy graduated from Kutztown, she knew she wanted to pursue a master's degree in wildlife management. But Tomosy also was anxious to work closely with nature, so rather than head straight to graduate school, she decided to spend two years gaining practical experience.
Her experiences during that period including attending the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine, surveying spotted owls for the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon, monitoring waterfowl and shorebirds at Salton Sea, working at an apiary in northern Alberta, teaching environmental education at the Reading YMCA and working in PPL Corp.'s ecology lab in Allentown.
None of those jobs paid very well said Tomosy, who noted that she received $17 a week, plus room and board, for the spotted owl work in Oregon, and $40 a week, plus room and board, for the job at Salton Sea in California.
"Those early years were a lot of getting my bubble burst. But that was good, because that was reality," Tomosy said.
In 1985, Tomosy enrolled in a master's program at the University of Michigan, and in 1987, she traveled to Puerto Rico, where she spent seven months conducting research for her thesis on the vocalizations of the endangered Puerto Rican parrot. At the time she was there, Tomosy said only 23 individual parrots -- and four breeding pairs -- remained in the wild.
Her days typically started at 3 a.m., when she would get out of bed and prepare for a 45-minute hike through the dark forest to a blind where she could watch the birds.
"The birds will abandon the nest if they are disturbed. That's why we had to get in the blind while it's still dark and stay in until it got dark again," Tomosy said.
"It's not for everybody, but I am fascinated by animal behavior. The parrots were amazing. To see them in the wild was truly a gift."
While she was in Puerto Rico, Tomosy got an offer from the U.S. Forest Service to return to the Pacific Northwest and do additional field work with spotted owls.
From 1988-92, Tomosy spent much of her time researching spotted owls and training others to do the same. She became an expert at capturing the birds using a white rat as bait, and said she could band, weigh and attach a radio transmitter to an owl in less than 20 minutes.
"The next year, we'd have to find the same birds and replace the transmitters, because the batteries wouldn't last," Tomosy said. "And it's harder to catch them the second time, because they remember the white rat."
Tomosy also spent time as a Forest Service consultant who helped evaluate the impact proposed timbering projects would have on wildlife. Both those jobs, said said, showed her how much positive impact her work could have on the environment.
"I was able to be the bridge between the field and the management decisions," she said. "I really did feel like I could make a difference."
From 1992-94, Tomosy served as a biologist in the Fish and Wildlife Service's Western region office in Portland, Ore., where she worked on endangered species listing actions. And in 1994, she took a job as an instructor at the service's National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, W. Va., where she spent the next six years preparing other federal employees for conservation efforts across the nation.
During her time at the training center, Tomosy decided she wanted to move into a management position where she could have a broad impact on conservation. In 2000, she got a job at Fish and Wildlife headquarters in Arlington, Va., where she served as a policy advisor on endangered species listing actions and served as a liaison to other federal agencies, universities and private conservation groups.
From 2002-2004, Tomosy participated in the Fish and Wildlife Service Advanced Leadership Development Program, which provided her with opportunities that included serving as assistant supervisor of the agency's Oregon state office and prioritizing imperiled species research needs for the U.S. Geological Survey.
'It's all about the birds.'
By the time Tomosy was hired as chief of the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory in June 2004, she had transformed herself from a fresh-faced, idealistic college student into a veteran biologist with a wealth of practical field work and supervisory experience.
"For me, being a conservationist started in the heart and moved up to the brain," she said. 'The growing part was learning to compromise, being creative about finding alternative solutions and being open to different potential answers to a question."
Although her current position forces Tomosy to spend most of her time in an office, rather than a forest, that hasn't dampened her enthusiasm.
"I love this job," she said, "because it's all about the birds."
Tomosy supervises a staff of 24 employees who run the North American Birding Banding Program, a joint venture between the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Canadian Wildlife Service. Since the inception of the program in 1908, 20 million game birds and 39 million non-game birds have been banded.
In addition to coordinating the use of tracking bands, the lab also authorizes the use of other tracking techniques, such as color marking and the use of radio and satellite transmitters. Nearly 2,000 active banders are licensed by the lab, along with another 3,000 sub-permittees who are authorized to work under their direction.
One such bander is Weidensaul, who noted that information gleaned from banding returns is critical to short-term objectives such as establishing annual waterfowl hunting seasons and long-term research such as monitoring a species' population status or identifying shifts in migratory routes.
"Almost everything concrete that we know about wild birds comes from marking them in some fashion," Weidensaul said. "And for anybody who is doing any kind of research on wild birds, the banding lab is critical to that."
Although banding data is a treasure trove for ornithologists, Tomosy said her job is to unleash its value by making it more accessible to scientists. Many historical banding records have only recently been computerized, and some information requests still must be manually processed by lab staff.
However, Tomosy is leading an aggressive effort to make banding data available in an interactive, online format that will make it easier for researchers, management agencies and conservation groups to identify trends and make decisions.
"It really is exciting to know that we are at the beginning of a new era in terms of how bird banding data is used," she said.
Keith Bildstein, Hawk Mountain's director of conservation science, said the work Tomosy is doing at the banding lab will probably have more impact on bird conservation than anything she could do in field.
"Even though she's not back here in Pennsylvania, she's sort of come home to her roots, in terms of being tied to the study of migration of birds," Bildstein said.
"It doesn't have the sort of glamour of being out in the rainforest, but it has an enormous impact on the understanding of the biology of birds -- and that's fundamental to our ability to protect them."
christian.berg@mcall.com
610-778-2252
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