Gary Langham joined Audubon California as lead scientist and Director of Bird Conservation in 2007. He is also a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, most recently teaching Ornithology. He has worked as a Research Fellow in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at U.C. Berkeley. This postdoctoral position involved a lot of fieldwork in Queensland, Australia studying the effects of climate change on lizards and other vertebrates.

Langham grew up in Sacramento in a family closely associated with Audubon (his dad was President of Sacramento Audubon), and he has been an active birder since his early childhood. Over a 20-year period, Gary has lead more than 100 birding and natural history tours for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours in the Americas.

In 2003, Langham received his Ph.D. from Cornell University having completed a dissertation under Drs. John Fitzpatrick and David Winkler on the role that avian foraging behavior played in the maintenance and evolution of Heliconius butterfly mimicry in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia. He recently completed a postdoctoral NSF fellowship in Australia. He also taught ornithology as a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley.

In 2000, he was the founding president of a volunteer non-profit called the Neotropical Grassland Conservancy, which has a fine appreciation for the power of citizen science in advancing conservation goals.

Gary is a co-author of the flycatcher accounts in the Handbook of the Birds of the World, vol 9. From 1984 to 2002, he traveled every year to Venezuela as a naturalist, and since 1988 as a professional tour leader for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT). Gary has studied birds or lead tours throughout North America as well as Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Australia

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To request an interview with Gary Langham, contact Garrison Frost.