Michael Swaim

Born a mile high in Idaho near the Grand Tetons, Michael has often gravitated toward far-flung places and geographic extremes.  During his childhood, when not day dreaming or watching Jacques Cousteau episodes on an all-tube black & white TV, he was busily engaged in activities like collecting fire ants, building treehouses, and having an emergency root-canal after a swinging metal canteen broke a tooth while climbing Pike’s Peak.  After graduating from the University of Colorado with a B.S. in Biology in 1995, Michael moved to rural Alaska where he worked for a number of national parks and national wildlife refuges.  In 2015, he joined the waterfowl section of the Alaska Region Migratory Bird Management Program where he is focused on conducting aerial surveys, designing new studies, and managing long-term spatially explicit data sets that are used to monitor the status and trend of waterfowl populations, determine the recovery status of listed species, and assess the potential effects of proposed development projects.