PRIZE: Classes mix lecture, lab and field work

From Page A1 good researcher unless you can communicate that information to stakeholders and learn from others,” he told The Enterprise.

Acknowledging the “amazing group of educators at UC Davis,” Eadie said, “I'm very, very appreciative, but I’m also like, ‘oh my gosh, why me?’”. Throughout his career, Eadie has seen incredible resumes, CVs, and letters for professors on campus.

Eadie was the department chair from 2012 to 2017 before handing the position to Fangue, whom he mentored. “He left our department in a strong position, leading us through fiscal challenges while recruiting and retaining talented junior faculty. He encourages all faculty to elevate their pedagogy and made clear that we in WFCB take teaching and mentorship as seriously as we do our scholarship,” she wrote.

Eadie joined the department in 1995, starting as an assistant professor and moving up through the years until being named distinguished professor in 2022, according to biographical background in the award announcement. Eadie was the department chair from 2012-2017 and he currently serves as the Dennis G. Raveling Endowed Chair in waterfowl biology. Eadie’s courses are a mixture of lecture, laboratory and field classes. By his estimates, he’s taught more than 3,000 undergraduate students during his career at UC Davis. He also contributes to seminars in the Avian Sciences Graduate Group and Animal Behavior Graduate Group.

Since 2012, Eadie has served as a team member to revise the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, which goes back to 1986. Prior to the 2012 Revision, the plan focused only on bird populations and their habitat, but it was missing the importance of human engagement and human enterprise in conservation practices. “That goes without saying, you know, writ large, but even in 2012 people were concerned, ‘we can barely manage the birds and the habitat.

Now you want us to manage people. What are you thinking?’”

Despite the pushback, he and his colleagues remained steadfast in their message. “People matter. In fact, people may be the North Star of everything. If you can’t get people to care and to feel that this is part of them, something that they value, something that they think is important to sustain, then the battle is lost. That starts with me as an educator.”

Accompanying the award is a $60,000 prize, which Eadie and his wife, Jane, are using to establish a new scholarship supporting underrepresented and nontraditional students in wildlife and waterfowl biology.

Funded through philanthropic gifts managed by the UC Davis Foundation, the prize is one of the largest teaching prize in the country. Eadie says it will provide an opportunity to jumpstart efforts to increase opportunities for incoming students. “We have to open the doors to young students who may not know this is a career path for them, but one that has such great value.”

If the constituency of the field doesn't represent society, Eadie asks how wildlife conservation can move forward. Given how underrepresented many sectors of society are in the wildlife profession, Eadie says, it falls on educators to offer more opportunities to the next generation.

To Eadie, who grew up on a farm in British Columbia, fundamental to the human spirit is the connectivity with nature. Despite the challenges of growing up in a family of five raised by a single mother, he feels he had the best childhood with the whole outdoors around him. He wants opportunities to have that connection be universal.

“We have to provide that to others.” Expanding these opportunities, he says, leads to a more diverse population caring for the environment.

One of these efforts is the Wood Duck Internship Program at UC Davis, which Eadie has led since 1995, in which more than 500 students have had the opportunity to study waterfowl. Akin to a scouting experience, students help put up duck boxes and, for four hours once a week, help check the nests, band birds, and measure eggs.

“It seems pretty simple,” he said, “but for many of these students, it’s amazing. I mean, you see them hold a duckling, and there is this connection formed. It’s like when we play with kittens and puppies. And it’s indescribable — that bond gets formed at the same time as you’re also providing some real baseline experiences in a safe outdoor situation.”

Passionate about wetlands because “we’ve lost half of them” and in California, 90% have been lost, Eadie explains that while his specialization is waterfowl and wetland birds, his interest is also on the other “ecological goods and services” that wetlands provide, such as water storage, flood control, water filtration and a litany of values within those wetland habitats.

Part of his motivation in teaching follows from the well-documented Nature Deficit Syndrome confronting our young people; it argues that a lack of connection to nature can lead to a variety of challenges including learning disorders, lack of concentration, and reduced empathy for others and the natural world.

Eadie summarizes this in a saying he often tells his students: “Mud on the boots. Skin in the game — We won't sustain what we don't care for; we won't care unless we find some value in it, and we can’t value what we don’t know or understand.”… In other words, you can't blame someone for not knowing or not caring if they haven't had the opportunity to experience that connection with nature. It’s our job, as educators, to help forge that connection.”

Eadie will be honored at a gala at the Mondavi on Thursday, Feb. 2.

— Contact Monica Stark at monica@davisenterprise.net.