Doug Forsell has studied migratory birds for over 28 years. He received his Masters
Degree from California State University - Humboldt in Wildlife Management, where he
studied the predatory efficiency and energetics of belted kingfishers. He has worked for
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 25 years. He spent ten years in Alaska primarily
studying the at sea distribution and abundance of marine birds, but he also worked on
their food habits, seabird colony surveys, high seas gillnet mortality of birds, and
recovery efforts of the endangered Aleutian Canada goose. He spent four years as the
refuge manager of five remote tropical Pacific islands where he studied breeding
biology of 12 species of tropical seabirds, reef fishes, and green sea turtles. Since
moving to the Chesapeake Bay area in 1990, he chaired the Waterfowl and Other
Waterbirds Workgroup in the Chesapeake Bay Program which worked to implement the
Waterfowl Management Plan. His major activities in the Bay have involved
interpretation of waterfowl population trends, surveys of waterbirds in offshore waters
of the Chesapeake Bay, assessing the mortality of waterbirds in anchored gillnets,
modeling diving duck distributions, and identifying threats to birds and their habitats and
promoting their restoration.

Doug first went to Howland and Baker Islands in 1977, and this will be his sixth trip to
the Islands. He is especially interested in the movement of the one million nesting
seabirds between the two Islands since the 1920's and especially since cats were
removed from the islands in the late 1960's and 1970's.