Sacha Heath

Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow, Living Earth Collaborative

Sacha’s unique role as a postdoc for the Living Earth Collaborative allows her to work with multiple institutions at once, including WashU, SLU, and the Saint Louis Zoo. She works on a range of biodiversity projects, with a focus on the birds and the bees.

“Since we don’t have much long-term data on birds in St. Louis we can replace that temporal gradient with a spatial gradient, with the idea that urbanization represents the most recent time and the rural areas are representative of the past. The Audubon Society has a network throughout the region of landowners that keep track of their birds, which provides us with an amazing study design that already exists to tap into.”

When did you first become fascinated by birds?

“Early on, when I was five years old, I lived in Lake Tahoe. So in the beginning I really enjoyed just being outside and in the forest by myself. I really keyed into the bird stuff when I took a course as an undergrad on the natural history of California. We learned how to keep a Joseph Grinnellian journal and how to balance internal reflections with scientific observations.”

Sacha just moved to St. Louis to get started on some research and she’s already found a home here at Tyson, taking in all the new bird calls.

“From my perspective, I view the world through the birds I see. I think it’s a really cool way to get to know a new area because everything is completely new wherever you go. Here, it’s a completely different flyway, with the birds coming up the Mississippi. It’s mind exploding to be a birder here.”

Sacha is collaborating with Solny Adalsteinsson and worked with Solny’s Tick & Wildlife Ecology team during summer 2019.