My Story

My first word was “Bird!” At nine months old, I stood at a window streaming with sun, pointed into the clear blue sky, and spoke to a flock of swallows winging past. With that word, my life was set on a track focused on nature. Whether it was cages of parakeets and finches, terraria with treefrogs and lizards, tanks of tropical fish, or a particularly feisty snapping turtle named Ferdinand, my early life was filled with living creatures. But of all the creatures, it was the birds, and always the birds, that most animated my interest. Over time my relationship to birds changed and refined, and I am more confident than ever that my mission is to protect birds through all possible means, including museums, citizen science, and fieldwork, oriented towards inclusive conservation.

Despite familial uncertainties, one constant in my life was always science, and I dove deeply into education and opportunities for research. My senior year in high school I spent in a competitive life-sciences program at Cornell University, where I landed a semester of study in the Department of Landscape Architecture. My interest in landscapes and human-created spaces expanded as I learned formal drafting techniques and built tiny scale models of my designs. The year culminated in a critical review of my final project, a redesign of a schoolyard, by senior faculty in the department including now-emeritus Prof. Daniel Krall, whose work on landscape planning for underserved communities has inspired my vision for equitable cityscapes. After leaving home, I moved to Costa Rica, where I volunteered with an international team of conservationists at the Macaw Recovery Network to repatriate the native subspecies of Scarlet Macaw Ara macao cyanopterus to regions where it had been locally extinct for over 100 years. In Costa Rica I learned macaw husbandry, release techniques, and improved my spoken Spanish. Meanwhile, I witnessed the challenges of intercultural communication juxtaposed with how wildlife conservation unites diverse people toward a common goal.

The next adventure was a Wallace-Carver Fellowship with the United States Department of Agriculture. I worked in the plant pathology lab of Dr. Barbara Smith at a small-fruits research station in rural Mississippi. The lab focused on pathogenic fungi that reduce functioning of blueberries. Under lab lead Dr. Melinda Butler, I began to form an understanding of plant pathology and the importance of federal agricultural development for food security. I also successfully implemented the Koch’s postulate to reisolate a fungal pathogen Phytophthora cinnamomi from an inoculated blueberry bush Vaccinium corymbosum. My work was profiled by a local news outlet. The research showed that some cultivars of blueberry can remain productive while withstanding soil conditions that are unideal for pathogens—an important finding for the future of commercial blueberry production.

That fall I took a train a thousand miles to Wheaton, Illinois where I began my undergraduate degree. As a small, faith-based liberal arts college with a strong focus on community, Wheaton College made a unique contribution to my development as a person and scientist. I enjoyed my experience, and felt a strong pull towards biological inquiry, yet Wheaton held few options. So the summer after sophomore year, I was back at Cornell University, working at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. In the lab of Dr. Maria Harrison, I helped Australian postdoc Dr. Stephanie Watts-Fawkes on a Department of Energy-funded project. I processed Sorghum bicolor leaf samples from plants experimentally inoculated with different species of beneficial mycorrhizal fungi. This study showed that some sorghum cultivars form more efficient symbioses with arbuscular mycorrhizae than do others, with implications for reducing fertilizer inputs in nutrient-poor soils. Back at Wheaton, I applied my experiences from Cornell to my work in the Biology Department as the Greenhouse Manager and Fishkeeper, where I maintained the college’s living plant collection, halted pest outbreaks, and cared for laboratory animals.

My first major international research opportunity arose during my third year at Wheaton. As part of an immersive foreign-research program I received a $2,000 John Stott Travel Scholarship, and under the guidance of ecologist Dr. Kristen Page I moved to northern Tanzania and lived with a family in an agricultural community for seven months. After several weeks of Swahili language school thanks to a $1,500 Language Learning Scholarship, I worked as an Agroecology Research Intern with ECHO East Africa, an NGO focused on reducing hunger by training subsistence farmers in sustainable land management practices. I designed a study to assess how direct anthropogenic modifications to landscapes altered bird and tree species composition. With the help of students from Sokoine University of Agriculture, I interviewed farmers to learn about their cropping practices and opinions of birds. This was my first practice with project leadership and team formation. We used point-counts to survey birds, indexed the diversity and abundance of trees bordering fields, and documented arthropod damage on crops. By incorporating these dimensions, my study demonstrated that there are untapped ecosystem services that birds can provide to farmers in northern Tanzania. The results were published in the journal ECHO Development Notes in English, French, Spanish – and translated into Swahili by my Tanzanian host sister Miriam.

Upon returning to the United States, I wrote a 64-page thesis on the integration of biology with business, and used my research in Tanzania as a case study. After graduating from Wheaton College, I worked as a Program Officer for the Amphibian Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission. Working on an international team, I prepared Red List assessments for 285 amphibian species globally, and finalized another 112 species. Many of these amphibians had never been evaluated by the IUCN Red List, thus providing a first-time opportunity for these species to receive conservation attention. In this role, I used my strong Spanish-language skills to read original species description papers, strengthened my grasp on taxonomy, honed technical skills for range-mapping, and built acuity for reviewing literature. I was profoundly impacted by the possibility that species survival was contingent upon how well I did my job, emphasizing the high stakes of performing quality conservation work in my career.

To satiate my hunger for work involving birds, I began to volunteer in the Bird Collections of the Field Museum in Chicago. The ornithology staff, hearing me comfortably speak Swahili with visiting Kenyan scientists, saw potential in my abilities and future, and provided me with first part-time, then full-time work in the Bird Collections. In my free time, with Dr. John Bates, Dr. Dave Willard, Dr. Doug Stotz, and Dr. Ben Marks, I contributed to Christmas Bird Counts, Spring Counts, and the Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas. With another museum colleague (Kayleigh Kueffner, now working on birds in Borneo), I spearheaded a workflow to digitally image bird specimens that were due to be skeletonized. This project, appropriately called PLUME: Phenotypic Linkage Utilizing Multimedia in EMu, documented the feathers of migrant birds that died by colliding with windows in Chicago during their migration. I imaged nearly 3,000 birds of over 110 species, resulting in 5,300 unique images. Then I uploaded these photos to the relational database EMu, where they remain as a free repository for researchers worldwide. I presented a poster on this work at the joint meeting of the Wilson Ornithological Society and Association of Field Ornithologists in Cape May, New Jersey in 2019, generating interest in the digitization community. The imaged birds were also part of analyses that ranged from feather mites to gut microbiomes. A 2020 analysis of 70,716 Field Museum specimens demonstrated that all 52 species of North American birds in the study are diminishing in body size due to climate change. Images that I took for PLUME were featured in a Vox video on this study, now viewed over 720,000 times.

Like many people, I was affected by the onset of COVID while I was working at the Field Museum. However, this did not quell my interest in pursuing bird research. In April 2020 I took a walk on a street with traffic noise muted by the lockdown and heard a faint tapping above me, discovering a crow using a twig as a tool to pry under bark. I photographed this bird, and subsequently published the observation in Meadowlark, A Journal of Illinois Birds – the first-ever documentation in the literature of a wild crow using a tool in Illinois. During the pandemic I also contacted the editor of Birds of the World at Cornell Lab of Ornithology and was accepted as author of the authoritative species account for the Böhm’s Bee-eater Merops boehmi, a charismatic insectivore from southeastern Africa.

With friend and colleague Dr. Dave Willard, I drove 7,000 miles between Chicago and Anchorage, Alaska to attend the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Society. As I stepped into the bright Dena’Ina Convention Center, the air buzzed with the electric excitement of two thousand bird researchers, and I had the deep sense that I had made my way home. I had never before experienced a community where I fully fit in, and where the knowledge that I had been building since childhood was welcomed and enhanced. At this conference, the desire was firmly planted in me to go to graduate school for avian ecology. Following the trip to Alaska, I was impressed with the importance of museum collections and yet felt drawn back outdoors to field ecology. So when the opportunity for a Master’s degree arose, I jumped at the chance to use my museum knowledge-base while growing in my analytical skillset. Dr. Eric Wood at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) welcomed me to join his Avian and Urban Ecology Lab in the fall of 2021. I was so inspired by the urban ecology focus of his work, along with his commitment to conservation, that I turned down better-funded MS and PhD offers in order to join his lab, including declining a $30,000 Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship though the U.S. Department of Education for advanced study of Swahili. Over the next two years, I completed a Master’s degree modeling the pre-urban occupancy of breeding birds in the Los Angeles Basin and comparing these models to their distributions after urban development.

Following the completion of my Master’s, I spent several months at the University of California, Berkeley working in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology affiliated with the lab of Dr. Rauri Bowie. I was supported by a Casanova Research Fellowship and began a project on feather microstructure in Canada Jays (Perisoreus canadensis). As this project moves forward, I plan to relate collection location, genetic data, and climatic variables to explore drivers of phenotypic variation in this very cold-adapted bird.

In the spring of 2023 I accepted a PhD position in the lab of Dr. Matthew Hutchinson at the University of California, Merced. Over the next five years, I plan to work on the behavioral ecology of Southern Ground-Hornbills (Bucorvus leadbeateri) in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. I hope to identify why this population of hornbills is thriving despite range-wide declines in the species.

I offer deep thanks to the many people who have been part of this story along the way - this work was made possible through your generous time, resources, and opening of opportunities. More learnings and adventures are yet to come, so it’s not over yet! If you want to get in touch, please drop me a note - I would enjoy hearing from you.

Sean C. Lyon

Merced, CA

During the past several years I have been honored as Honorable Mention for the 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and awarded a 2022-23 Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholarship. At the University of California, Merced I am an Earle C. Anthony Fellow. See my CV for other recent works.