Quail Researcher to Lead James Reserve

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The James San Jac­into Moun­tains Reserve has a new direc­tor in biol­o­gist Jen­nifer Gee. Since grad­u­ate school, Gee’s work has taken her from the green forests of Mass­a­chu­setts to the deserts of north­ern Mex­ico, and the flasks and chem­i­cals of the lab­o­ra­tory to the wilds of the Gala­pa­gos Islands. Now she plans to apply her years of field expe­ri­ence to help classes and sci­en­tists vis­it­ing Black Moun­tain in South­ern California.

Gee first encoun­tered the Nat­ural Reserve Sys­tem as a Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity grad­u­ate stu­dent. She came west to study hybridiza­tion pat­terns between two closely related bird species, Gambel’s quail (Cal­lipepla gam­be­lii) and Cal­i­for­nia quail (Cal­lipepla cal­i­for­nica). She found both bird species in abun­dance at the NRS’s Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Cen­ter, which became the site of her the­sis work. Spend­ing roughly five months of the year over five years in the Coachella Val­ley desert and the Santa Rosa Moun­tains, Gee says, “I fell in love with that place and those birds.”

After grad­u­a­tion, she took a posi­tion as a post­doc­toral fel­low at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, then Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. She focused her research on a species of Darwin’s finches called the war­bler finch, com­par­ing it with a rel­a­tive called the bananaquit. Addi­tional field­work in the Gala­pa­gos and Bar­ba­dos allowed her to study beak devel­op­ment. Gee also con­ducted exper­i­ments with the Java finch at Harvard’s Con­cord Field Station.

“It was a fas­ci­nat­ing detour which reshaped my view of evo­lu­tion, but I was both­ered by per­sis­tent ques­tions that I had left unan­swered about the ori­gin of quail and how each of the Cal­lipeplaquail species had formed. My grad­u­ate field work had made me feel like I was just get­ting a han­dle on that sys­tem,” Gee says.

She resumed her quail work with col­lab­o­ra­tor Jen­nifer Calkins. To raise money for their research, the sci­en­tists used a quin­tes­sen­tially mod­ern approach: social media. They designed a series of donor gifts rang­ing from quail trad­ing cards to T-shirts, and pitched their project on Kickstarter.com, an online fundrais­ing plat­form. Their efforts raised almost $5,000. The money enabled Gee and Calkins to travel to Mex­ico and for Gee to inves­ti­gate yet another hybridiza­tion fron­tier, this time between Gambel’s and ele­gant quail (Cal­lipepla dou­glasii).

Dur­ing this period, Gee served as interim man­ager of the Bernard Field Sta­tion, adja­cent to and owned by the Clare­mont Col­leges. The posi­tion allowed her to relaunch her quail project, and gave her expe­ri­ence man­ag­ing a field station.

There, Gee expe­ri­enced an epiphany. “Direct­ing a field sta­tion felt like my call­ing in life,” Gee says. When for­mer James Reserve direc­tor Becca Fen­wick departed to become direc­tor of the NRS’s Yosemite Field Sta­tion, Gee leaped at the chance to apply for the position.

“Jen­nifer brings a wealth of aca­d­e­mic and prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence to the NRS,” says Allan Muth, direc­tor of the NRS’s Boyd Deep Canyon Reserve. “She is a sea­soned field biol­o­gist with lab­o­ra­tory cre­den­tials and she under­stands the inte­gra­tion of field and lab sci­ence. In addi­tion, she has man­age­ment expe­ri­ence at a field sta­tion that will enable her to com­fort­ably assume her respon­si­bil­i­ties at the James Reserve.”

Gee couldn’t be hap­pier to entwine her fate with that of the James Reserve. “The James Reserve turned out to be the chance of a life­time. It is just a few kilo­me­ters from a place and com­mu­nity that I unwit­tingly made my home and clearly knew some­how I had to go back to. It’s such a happy end­ing and true beginning.”

Related Links

Quail Hybridiza­tion in Mex­ico, Sci­en­tist At Work series, New York Times

The Quail Diaries: sci­ence, cul­ture & quail