David Wyatt

Hi everyone! My name is Dave Wyatt and for nearly three decades I've been a biology professor at Sacramento City College where I teach courses in the Field Ecology program. I am a wildlife biologist with research interests in mammalogy and entomology and I specialize in working with ringtails (a relative of raccoons, coatis, and kinkajous) and bats. With ringtails, much of my work occurred/occurs in the northern Central Valley of California along the riparian environments of the Feather River and in the oak woodlands of the Sutter Buttes. I have conducted research using radio telemetry to determine home ranges and habitat utilization and finding den sites, conducted food habits analysis, have obtained morphometrics from over 120 individual ringtails, and conducted hair snare and wildlife camera studies targeting ringtails with my collaborator Kristyn Schulte.

I also have a love of all things dealing with entomology. One of my favorite places to travel to is Belize in Central America - I have been fortunate to be able to go to Belize numerous times during the last decade. A decade ago (2014) we were able to fund on Experiment the start-up costs associated with an entomology project in Belize. That initial project has now blossomed into multiple University field classes in Belize and over a decade of an insect biodiversity inventory project for several areas in the Maya Mountains of Belize.

My most recent project is this - the California Ringtail Project - to help determine the distribution of ringtails in California by using a passive method of remote sensing data collection through the use of Wildlife Cameras.

February 2014