[Bristol-Birds] BBC's student begins summer field studies in the Sierra Nevadas

Chris O'Bryan arrived this evening at his base camp at Shaver Lake
CA where he began work today as a  Student Amphibian 
Field Technician with the U.S. Forest Service in the 
Sierra Nevada Mountains.  He is working with the Forest Service 
Pacific Southwest Research Station. This is a national program 
that involves the research station, research conducted by the 
University of California Davis and the University of California Berkeley. 

The Sierra National Forest, adjacent to the southern part of  Yosemite
National Park, includes more than 1.3 million acres (an area about the
size of the combined Mount Rogers National Recreation Area south of
the New River in Virginia, all the Cherokee National Forest lands in 
Tennessee to north Georgia and including the entire Great Smoky 
Mountains National Park of Tennessee and North Carolina).  

The forest is at altitudes ranging from 900 to 13,986 feet in elevation. 
Chris will be conducting backcountry field work on the western slopes
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and often out many days afield and 
many miles out -- much of it packing, camping and researching on foot.  

He spent more than a week alone driving, herping, birding and camping 
as he traveled 3,000 miles to begin work this morning at 8 a.m. when
he checked in at the Sierra Nevada Research Center four hours north of 
Shaver Lake at Davis, CA.  He had been scheduled to start earlier but the 
snow in the mountains only began to melt in the last couple of weeks. 
He expects to be with the project for about eight weeks.

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