Ken Levenstein joined WEST in July as a Project Manager in California.Coming from a research background, Ken has studied avian ecology all over the United States and overseas as well. Following the completion of his Master’s research, a mist-netting study in the Central American jungles of Belize, Ken worked on projects detailing the reproductive ecology of Bicknell’s thrush on the mountaintops of New England; the southwestern willow flycatcher along the Lower Colorado River from the Grand Canyon to the Mexican border; and a number of species in the hardwood forests of southern Indiana and the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.
Ken’s Ph.D. research was on cooperative breeding in birds in general and the reproductive ecology of his model species for the research, the Galápagos hawk, a species endemic to the Galápagos archipelago, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. For this research Ken and his Ecuadorean assistants spent four entire summers camped in tents on an entirely uninhabited island to which they had to bring all of the food and water they would need for 3 months at a time! While completing his dissertation, Ken took some time off to work two seasons (first as field crew leader and then as field supervisor) for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in their effort to document the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the bayous of eastern Arkansas.
Following the completion of his Ph.D., Ken was hired as a University of Washington postdoctoral research associate to direct the field research on two critically endangered birds native to the island of Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. Commonwealth), the Mariana Crow and the Rota bridled white-eye. Ken comes to us from BHE Environmental, Inc. in Cincinnati where he worked primarily with energy companies wishing to set up wind farms in the Midwest.
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