Jane (Ricky) Warriner
Research Associate
Jane (Ricky) Warriner was a key member of the small group of Point Blue staff and volunteers who founded the Snowy Plover Research Project in 1977. Her experience, hard work, and commitment to the species’ well-being have continued to help guide the project’s direction to the present. In the early years, she and her late husband, John Warriner, led a group of volunteers at a salt panne near the Pajaro River mouth in north Monterey Bay, who patiently watched a small group of individually color-banded nesting plovers from dawn to dusk. This effort culminated in an award winning paper on the species’ unique serially polygamous breeding system, on which she is a co-author. That work evolved into a monitoring project of the breeding birds that, by 1984, had expanded to include the rest of Monterey Bay’s plover nesting habitat. Over the course of the following 31 years she has surveyed and monitored nesting and wintering plover on most beaches in the Monterey Bay area. She presently focuses her field efforts at one of Monterey Bay’s major breeding areas, Pajaro River spit, although most of her time is spent in the essential tasks of handling band combinations and tracking sighting data from Monterey Bay and beyond, two jobs that help hold together the complicated datasets on color-marked plovers managed at Point Blue and by our partners throughout the West. She provides Monterey Bay co-workers with band combinations, makes certain colors are not duplicated, and takes responsibility for data entry of thousands of sightings of plovers seen by the plover team and volunteer observers. To assist the plover team in their field work she prepares and provides summaries of the color combinations of chicks that have hatched and those that have been reported fledged throughout the Monterey Bay area. On top of all these contributions, she hosts the annual spring and fall inter-agency meetings for Recovery Unit 4, from Sonoma to Monterey County. Prior to her work with Snowy Plovers she was involved with Point Blue research since 1972, when as an original beached bird project volunteer she covered the beach at the Pajaro River mouth for beach-cast marine birds and mammals.