Anne Ruggles, Executive Director

Anne has B.S. degrees in Zoology and Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.S. in Wildlife Biology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law with a concentration in natural resources law. She has worked for twenty years as a field biologist in Central America, Texas, Alaska, and Colorado. Her work has included wildlife habitat assessments, species inventories, determining population densities and distribution, species and habitat monitoring and mapping of habitat use. From 1990-1996 Anne served, variously, on the Alaska Wolf Management Planning Team, the Alaska Board of Game and the Citizens Advisory Council (Wildlife Chair) to the Department of Forestry for the Tanana Valley State Forest in Interior Alaska. In 2004 she was appointed to the Colorado Wolf Management Working Group. As a member of these organizations she was extensively involved in the development of policy and management of wildlife. Most recently, Anne was a Senior Wildlife Ecologist with Bear Canyon Consulting in Boulder, Colorado and a board member for the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory. Anne’s interests include backpacking with her husband, Don (a rocket scientist with the Geophysical Institute and musician) and their dogs (Thalia and Camena, who carry their own packs), plus backcountry skiing, and winter camping.

Anna-Marie Benson, Research Associate

Anna-Marie started working for the Alaska Bird Observatory as a banding intern in 1994 and eventually worked up to the role of Senior Biologist before scaling back to raise a family. She now works part time for ABO and as an instructor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. During the past 12 years, her research has focused on bird migration and habitat use by migrant and resident birds in interior Alaska. Anna-Marie was born in Canada and earned her Master's Degree from UAF. Her graduate work focused on high-latitude passerine migration.  She enjoys spending most of her time with her daughters, Sophia and Juliette, and her husband, Carl. She loves a good battle with her skate skis, her sourdough bread starter, and any aspect of quantitative biology.

Tricia Blake, Education Program Manager

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Tricia earned a B.S. in biology from Boston College in 1997. Research and teaching opportunities have led her from the beaches of Cape Cod, MA tracking diamond back terrapin hatchlings and coyotes, to the rainforests of northeastern Australia studying spectacled flying foxes, to the volcanoes and sagebrush of central Oregon where she worked as a naturalist for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. There she had the opportunity to combine her enthusiasm for field work with education, helping to open the exciting world of field science to students of all ages. Since landing in Fairbanks (for the second time) in the fall of 2001, she has been learning, teaching, and exploring the natural history of Alaska both on and off the job. She can often be found hiking, skiing, knitting, and running around with her pooch Kyra.

Sue Guers, Migration Station Program Manager

Sue grew up at the base of the Appalachians on a 100-acre farm in eastern Pennsylvania.  After obtaining her undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Pittsburgh, she took an internship at Hawk Mt. Sanctuary and has been studying birds ever since.  She worked for PRBO Conservation Science on projects throughout California; including those in the Bay Area, the eastern Sierras and riparian of the Salton Sea. Sue has studied the gamut of species from seabirds on the Farallon Islands, to snowy plovers on the dry Owens Lake, to radioed ravens in the Point Reyes National Seashore. For two years Sue worked for the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary studying accipiter migration.  She made her first trip to Alaska in 2005 to work as a bander for ABO in Fairbanks and on our Arctic Warbler study. In 2006 Sue earned her Master’s Degree from Villanova University. She studied how forest fragmentation at and around Hawk Mountain influenced Black-capped Chickadee breeding success and also discovered that the Black-capped/Carolina Chickadee hybrid zone had extended north into her study area. In her spare time, Sue likes birding, knitting, skiing and hiking.

Nicole Pearce, Membership / Office Manager

Nicole grew up on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. She received her B.S. in Outdoor Education with an emphasis in Natural History from  Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. This program included a semester long course at the Audubon Center of the Northwoods and a nesting loon research study on Isle Royale National Park. In 2000 she began working for The Nature Conservancy as their Stewardship and Outreach Coordinator. She worked in this position for three years until the project was complete. Always curious about Alaska she accepted a guide position with Denali Backcountry Lodge and over the years worked as Head Naturalist and Assistant General Manager. In the off-season she did everything from guiding Manatee tours by kayak in Southern Florida to assisting with Polar Bear season in Churchill, Manitoba. In the fall of 2006 she stopped to visit with friends in the Seattle area and learned that the Jefferson Land Trust in Port Townsend, WA was hiring a Stewardship Director. She got the job, but as fate would have it she also took a trip to Victoria, BC that same week and met a man named David on the ferry. In August of 2007 David accepted a position as Emergency Manager with the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

You can now find Nicole in Fairbanks doing all the outdoor activities she has always loved along with learning how to build a brick bread oven, make cheese, and grow vegetables in her new garden and greenhouse.

Susan Sharbaugh, PhD, Senior Scientist

Ever since she was a little girl in Ohio, Susan has been interested in animals and why they do the things they do. A family move during her teens placed her in the Seattle area. It was at this time she developed her love/hate relationship with the Seattle Mariners. She completed a BA in Zoology at the University of Washington in 1980.  For the next ten years she worked on a number of field and lab projects: the breeding biology of Red-winged Blackbirds in eastern Washington, reproductive energetics of Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels in the Washington Cascades, Bay Wren singing behavior in Panama, Musk Ox foraging on Banks Island, NWT, and the hormonal control of behavior in the various sparrows. At some point she decided she wanted to direct her own research and applied for graduate school at the ripe age of 35 (it is never too late).  She arrived at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1991 and finished her PhD on the overwintering physiology of Black-capped Chickadees in 1997.

At first a migrant, she has turned into a resident. After graduation, she managed the daily operations at the Toolik Field Station as the Facilities Supervisor and taught as an adjunct professor for the Department of Biology and Wildlife at UAF. She is delighted to have this opportunity to work at ABO and continue to try to figure out why birds do the things they do. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, being outside, and watching the feeders with her indoor cat, Donna.

Dave first came to Alaska in 1998 after graduating with a B.S from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.  His first summer in Alaska he worked as an intern at ABO’s Denali Institute Migration Station in Denali National Park.  He fell in love with the state and moved up full time in 1999 to work as a bander at Creamer’s Field.  In 2002 he temporarily departed the bird observatory to pursue a graduate degree and work as a curatorial assistant at the University of Alaska Museum.  He finally received his masters in Wildlife Biology from UAF in 2006.  His thesis research dealt with migrant bird stopover ecology and conservation of resident species in the Neotropical rainforests of the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas, Mexico.  When he is not following birds along their migration to the tropics he enjoys other forms of travel and has spent as much time as possible abroad, visiting locales from Bhutan to Antarctica and many places in between.  While at home and depending on the season, Dave can be found skiing the trails, slopes and mountains around Fairbanks and the Alaska Range, fly-fishing Alaska’s rivers, backpacking along remote ridgelines, poking under mossy rocks, or waiting for the perfect light with his camera.

Kelly Wien, Financial Manager

Kelly was born and raised here in Fairbanks, went to school in Washington, spent a year in D.C. then decided that Fairbanks is a great place to live. She's a fifth generation Alaskan, both sides of her parents' families are some of the early pioneers. She has a bit of flying in her blood which, she says, " is about the only thing I have in common with birds." Kelly co-founded the first Internet Service Provider in Fairbanks, PolarNet, in 1994 and out of necessity she learned bookkeeping. Oddly enough she kinda likes it. Kelly has two children, Neill and Anya, and her nephew is the famous Nicholas Hajdukovich, aka "Jr. Birdman".