Brian Millsap and His Love For Raptors
Raptors are a group of birds that include hawks, eagles, falcons, and owls. Birds of prey have forward facing eyes, sharp talons, and hooked beaks and they exhibit incredible speed, accuracy, and diligence. These aerial predators are the king of the skies and Brian’s favorite kind of wildlife.
Brian Millsap is a raptor enthusiast, around-the-clock scientist, and falconer who “enjoys being part of the scientific process that helps keep our management decisions scientifically defensible.” He grew up in northern Virginia, in an area that was rural then but now is suburban Washington DC. While in high school Brian and his friends, most of which went on to have careers with the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), were recruited by William (Bill) Clark to assist with raptor nest surveys around northern Virginia and raptor migration trapping at Cape May, New Jersey. Thanks to Bill, Brian pursued the field of wildlife biology and a career focused on birds of prey.
Brian graduated from Colorado State University with a Bachelor’s of Science in Wildlife Biology, then worked for the Bureau of Land Management in Arizona and the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) in Washington DC as a Raptor Biologist. While working for the NWF, he completed a Master’s of Science in Biology at George Mason University. There he focused his research on the taxonomy of the gray hawk in North America which was the basis for splitting that hawk into two separate species — the gray hawk in North America and the gray-lined hawk in southern Central America and South America. After completing his Master’s, he took a job as the Bureau Chief for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and managed the agency’s nongame and endangered species programs in Florida.
For the past 20 years, Brian has worked for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, as Chief of the Division of Migratory Bird Management, Assistant Regional Director, Deputy Regional Director, and finally National Raptor Coordinator. He helped implement the then new eagle incidental take permit regulations on a detail, which turned into the job he still has today, National Raptor Coordinator for the USFWS, a Migratory Bird Program headquarters position based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Brian recognized the need to improve and modernize his quantitative skills in his new position, so for the next five years in his spare time, he worked to complete a PhD in Biology at New Mexico State University. For his dissertation, Brian developed a Bayesian integrated population model to explore metapopulation dynamics of an urban Cooper’s hawk population in Albuquerque. His research wouldn’t have been possible, had it not been for Kristin Madden, Migratory Bird Chief in the Southwest Region, and the data that came from her long-term collaborative field work.
Brian has always been participating in field studies of raptors, just like the one for his PhD, whenever he could. He shared, “I believe that participating in data collection and analysis, whether as part of my job or volunteering off-duty, has allowed me to remain functional as a practicing scientist, something I valued even when doing jobs that didn’t require it.” Brian has also been a falconer since 1968! For the past 19 years he’s flown a male (tiercel) peregrine falcon hunting ducks across eastern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle. Brian has learned first hand that ducks are pretty good at not getting caught by a peregrine!
“Falconry is an exceptional way to simultaneously enjoy the outdoors and have a front-row seat to some of the most dramatic predator-prey interactions you can imagine.”
Working as part of a team is how Brian learns best, and he believes “that team atmosphere fosters the best and most productive scientific work.” He goes on to say, “many of the problems the National Raptor Program tackles are hard and don’t have easy solutions, but the right people in the right environment working together, can do amazing things!” It is both exciting and rewarding to be part of this team of talented professionals, and it’s what keeps him motivated about the work they do.
Brian enjoys scientific inquiry and the objectivity it imparts on the management decision-making process. He says, “science, if done well, is a process that both provides answers as well as quantifies our uncertainty about those answers.” He believes it’s our obligation as responsible public servants, to report and be transparent about both.
Over his career, Brian has been involved in scientific work that has resulted in about 70 papers published in peer reviewed journals or book chapters. He’s also served as co-editor on several books. Most of which has been focused on supporting applied management decisions. Check out one of his recent articles on an integrated population model to inform take managements for the beloved bald eagle. Recently, he has focused on estimating population size, causes of mortality, and allowable take rates for eagles. In this work, his team has tried to extend the valuable insights gained from managing waterfowl harvest to the management of incidental take of eagles — the FWS used this information to set take limits for bald and golden eagle permits. He’s also studied demographic implications of lead poisoning for eagles across North America and survival rate and age-specific cause of death of golden eagles in the Western U.S.
Another emphasis area for Brian’s work has been collecting and analyzing comparative demographic information or raptor populations in urban and not-so-urban areas. These studies have either looked at management questions regarding the effects of human development on raptors, or the inter-relationships between urban and surrounding non-urban raptor populations. He studied the comparative fertility and survival of bald eagles fledged from suburban and rural natal areas.
Finally, he’s conducted studies of raptor life history and systematics that don’t have direct management or conservation implications. He firmly believes that “investment in scientific studies that improve our understanding of life history are important, because a solid understanding of a species’ ecology is the foundation for everything else. Additionally, studies of common species can also reveal important aspects of demography that have relevance to imperiled species management, but which would never be apparent in work with those species because of small sample sizes, etc.” He researched the demographic consequences of sexual differences in age at first breeding in Cooper’s Hawks as well as the regional dynamics of an urban Cooper’s Hawk population.
He considers himself lucky to be able to work with such a “fascinating and super cool group of birds.” Raptors are what drew him into a career as a wildlife biologist, and he will probably end his career the same way. After 52 years he still can’t get enough of them! To learn more about raptors and Brian Millsap’s research, see his full list of publications discoverable via USFWS Library. This #FWSscholar blog series is brought to you by the USFWS Library, #WeAreUSFWS, #SomosUSFWS.
