Spotlight interview: Jane Capozzelli
February 3, 2021
Former Staff Researcher Jane Capozzelli recently left Wild Animal Initiative to work as a Partner Avian Biologist for the State of West Virginia’s Division of Natural Resources.
This is a bittersweet transition for all of us. As one of the first researchers to join our team, Jane shaped our organization with her deep expertise, critical questions, and creative ideas. She built our first relationships with researchers and practitioners in restoration ecology, wildlife rehabilitation, disease ecology, compassionate conservation, and One Health — all crucial perspectives on wild animal welfare issues.
She is also the first researcher to leave our team. While we will certainly miss her, we are excited to see what the next chapter of her career holds. The success of wild animal welfare research depends on people like Jane exchanging ideas between the many experts needed to understand and improve the lives of animals in the wild.
Before she left, I interviewed Jane about her experience at Wild Animal Initiative, her interest in wild animal welfare, and what she’s looking forward to in her new job. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hollis:
How did you come to work in wild animal welfare?
Jane:
A combination of timing, chance encounters, experience, and future interests.
I had just graduated with my master’s in natural resources. My work was more land-based. I was working on ecosystem resilience and stability, and I wanted to get more into animal-focused issues. I was also thinking about a future career in wildlife health, so I was interested in issues affecting individual wild animals, like human-wildlife conflicts.
I happened to meet Abraham [Rowe, co-founder of Wild Animal Initiative,] in college. I was just getting in touch with old friends, and one of his first questions was “So Jane, are you following your dream of starting a seagull sanctuary?” I said “I guess so, are you?” And he said, “Yeah, I actually am. I’m starting a wild animal welfare nonprofit. We have an opening, maybe you should try and apply.” So I did, and that’s how I got into wild animal welfare.
H:
You had a dream of running a seagull sanctuary? It sounds like you were interested in individual animals and their welfare for a long time.
J:
Yeah I was, but you know, even in wildlife rehabilitation the word welfare isn’t really used. Which is odd, I think, because it’s definitely an iteration of it. I don’t really know why the veterinary field doesn’t use [the term welfare] as much.
H:
Seagulls aren’t a species of conservation concern, which makes it even more interesting that you wanted to start a sanctuary for them before you identified wild animal welfare as an area you wanted to work in.
J:
Yeah, and they don’t even really pose a human health concern. I liked working with them a lot. I thought they were very neglected in the clinic [where I worked]. Their diet was poor, so we changed the diet. It’s about a five- to six-week recovery on wing fractures, but they just weren’t getting the same amount of attention. That’s why I first got into seagulls, and then I just kind of got to liking them a lot once I was working with them one-on-one.
H:
Can you tell me more about your experience working in a wildlife rehabilitation clinic?
J:
I was at the Wild Bird Fund in Manhattan. I started as an animal care volunteer, which is just cage cleaning, husbandry, and feeding. This clinic was more hands-on than usual, with a lot of volunteer and staff training for clinical procedures like bandaging fractures, wound care, splint-making, and lead tests, so I was able to become a wildlife rehabilitator too. I was a mid-level manager there for two years right after undergrad. Then I moved on to graduate school for more ecosystem-type management stuff, trying to make as big an impact as possible. There’s a balance between working with individual animals and working in [natural resource] management. I was still looking for that balance after graduating from my master’s program, which is what brought me to Wild Animal Initiative.
H:
Interesting. You enjoyed working with individuals, but you wanted to go into management because that meant working at a scale that would affect more animals?
J:
Yeah, I specifically want to do both simultaneously. That’s always been the ideal, in the back of my mind. I’ll probably keep it in the back of my mind as an ornithologist too. It’s what I feel is most satisfying, working on both the land and the animals themselves.
H:
Can you tell me about your new job?
J:
I’m going to start at the state of West Virginia with the Division of Natural Resources as a Partner Avian Biologist. Public outreach and bird monitoring are my two main tasks. I’ll be working with private landowners to adapt their land management program to make the landscape more hospitable for bird species, and specifically I’m targeting the cerulean warbler. West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio — these northeastern Appalachian states are working with the federal government to make a landscape management program for cerulean and golden-winged warbler recovery, so I’m working in that program specifically.
H:
Do you think the wild animal welfare perspective will inform your work going forward?
J:
I think that there are some programs where it’s possible, because when you get to these endangered species you start looking at individual nests, individual nesting productivity, migration, over-wintering. Since I’m focused on one species, we get to talk to a lot of different partners that work on all different stages of the life cycle. So that would be one avenue.
Secondly is public-relations-wise: landowner stewardship. For some people I've talked to, it’s very local. It’s about “the birds in my neighborhood,” “the birds on my land.” People want to protect animals, coexist with them, share them with future generations. I think that ethic [of wild animal welfare] will come up even more than maybe the science and research, as far as relating to people who might share a similar viewpoint as me: that wildlife could have excellent well-being. People are excited to make that happen. I think people’s attitudes [about wild animals] might be the most promising thing that I’m looking forward to learning more about.
H:
That makes a lot of sense. It also fits with your longtime interest in balancing your own impact between individuals and landscapes.
J:
Yeah, I think so. I think it totally makes sense why I’d gravitate to that.
H:
Are there any ways that your time at Wild Animal Initiative has changed you?
J:
I think working at WAI … has given me more experience on how to actually work with people with opinions. When I first started, I had limited direct experience with stakeholders, like non-scientists or even scientists outside of my lab. I had an ideal that people could work together [easily], but when you start actually working with people who might want to join a project together but aren’t sure [whether they want to collaborate with you], you really have to drill down to specifics. It’s a skill: you have to be realistic, precise, and reliable to garner trust and build a rapport.
H:
Who are the stakeholders you worked with?
J:
I talked to a lot of professors who are thinking about wild animal welfare and are trying to figure out how it works. I think [they were] more interested in something [more] interdisciplinary than just welfare-focused, perhaps, so then that becomes more like making compromises. So that’s a lot of language I learned at Wild Animal Initiative: thinking about what a compromise could look like and why it might work or not, and being open and talking about things pragmatically, appealing to different types of people.
H:
How have you changed Wild Animal Initiative?
J:
I think people are a lot more familiar with conservation now. Abraham told me when I was hired that I was the first person to ever apply with a conservation background, which I thought was surprising, coming from a human-animal coexistence frame of mind. And also from rehabilitation, which I was surprised is not more connected to welfare. [Wildlife rehabilitators have] a lot of [overlap with] conservation, but they still haven’t made the connection [to a welfare perspective]. So I think just being from that background and coming in with that information — being able to explain concepts, clarify what conservation is and what it does, what the different branches are, what the priorities are, that kind of thinking. I think [that] helped Wild Animal Initiative and opened it up, at least gave it more options to decide what ultimate direction [Wild Animal Initiative] wants to go in. So I was very happy to be able to do that.
H:
Right! During the two years that we worked together, Wild Animal Initiative started moving in a more interdisciplinary direction. I think you really helped us find our footing with your insight from restoration ecology and natural resource management.
J:
That’s great! Thanks Hollis, that’s really nice to hear. I think the pigeon project was a great indicator of that, because we were actually able to work with biologists on a concrete project. That has to do with broadening and outreach.
H:
What accomplishment are you most proud of from your time at Wild Animal Initiative?
J:
I think a couple of things. I’m a lot happier with my communications and project management skills. Article writing, outreach, interviews, conference papers — just a lot of variety, and a lot of challenges. I developed a lot personally, and I’m proud of that. For the group as a whole, I think the theory of change that we started in 2019 — doing that project together, I really loved doing that. I thought it was really exciting for everybody to come together and have a long-term plan for an organization. I never got to do that before, and it was just a really great experience to hear everybody’s input and actually come up with some kind of schematic, it was amazing.
H:
I totally agree. You have other achievements to be proud of, too. What about your article that was published in Restoration Ecology?
J:
I liked writing the article, but I think even better than that was the [Society for Ecological Restoration] conference abstract. Unfortunately, we never got to present because of Covid, but the abstract — similar to the article — was about how ecosystem restoration and animal welfare could interact. The theme was bringing together that individual level with the ecosystem-based work.
It was really exciting because I got to talk to different partners. We were going to get input from the Wild Bird Fund to use a case study from them on pigeon lead poisoning and biosentinels. We were going to work with Bryan Windmiller, the Director of Conservation at the New England Zoo over in Boston, about his turtle head-starting program. Turtle head-starting is when you rear the juvenile turtles through their most critical period so you can get survival higher than zero percent, for turtles specifically. [He was] doing it with school kids, and that is really cultivating a coexistence ethic, and I thought that was going to be a really cool case study. We were probably going to do something with [Dr. Samniqueka Halsey’s] lab about ecosystem health and how individual animals are the agents of that, like disease vectors and disease resistance and resilience. So I thought it was great that we could actually get different partners together, to go on the books with us and present at the conference.
H:
Absolutely. Since building those bridges was the focus of your time here, that seems like a great moment that really pulls that all together.
J:
Yeah, I thought it was, even though we didn’t present. Presenting at the conference is important, but actually just being able to write a presentation like that I thought was in itself an achievement, so I was happy enough with that. If we could, we should do it again on a totally different topic … The head-starting in New England and the Wild Bird fund in New York City, those are local-scale issues, so it’s easier to do hands-on interventions at a smaller scale.
H:
You were involved in the development of the pigeon project. Could you tell us a little bit about what you contributed to that project design, and why that was an intervention that we were interested in pursuing?
J:
Yeah, so the pigeon project was experimenting with a known and used contraceptive agent. Nicarbazin is an EPA-regulated pesticide, and when it’s eaten by pigeons every day it inhibits egg hatching, and when you do that you have lower numbers of pigeons over the course of several years.
One reason this was coming up in the context of animal welfare was the idea of lowering mortality rates, because mortality of juveniles, particularly, is high for pigeons. So the idea is you could reduce animal suffering by reducing [the number of juvenile] deaths. The second reason that nicarbazin became a prospect was because it’s already in use, so it’s marketable and cost-effective.
What I was working on was the study design. [Wild Animal Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow] Simon [Eckerström Liedholm] was working on the premise — the conceptualization and the applicability to wild animal welfare — and I was doing the multi-site application and treatment design. I mirrored it after the experiment in my master’s degree, which was a large-scale treatment. In this case, it would be a flock which would occupy about a 2-kilometer site — that’s about the home territory according to some papers on pigeon behavior — and then you want to monitor individuals within the site to see nesting productivity, nestling health and vigor, and female reproductive physiology. So it was a multi-scale experiment. [For] my master’s program, I was working on monitoring at the subscale of the treatments, and it was great to go to the other end, and think about how to set sites. It also shows people how [wild animal welfare] could also bring in applied health projects, so I was glad to work on that project for that reason.
H:
Nice. One last question: what’s your favorite bird?
J:
Oh, man. It changes all the time, but I think the yellow-breasted chat. I love seeing them in the field, because they make the most wonderful alarm calls. … Oh, I love the black-billed cuckoo, that’s very special. I saw this beautiful color morph of a pigeon in Central Park a couple months ago, an orange checker. People think I’m kidding about a beautiful orange pigeon as if it’s special, but it’s quite a good, rare color morph, in my opinion.
H:
One of the most memorable times that we’ve had conversations as coworkers was you waxing poetic about the shape of pigeons.
J:
Yeah! They are so plump. They’re beautiful birds.
It was an absolute pleasure working with Jane, and all of us at Wild Animal Initiative wish her well in her future endeavors! Read highlights of Jane’s work.