Salix Scoresby is a wildlife ecologist who has been lucky enough to work with some of the most elusive mammals in the West. A middle-school drop out from Kentucky, they pursued an unconventional education comprised of traveling, time in the wilderness, and self-study, and began to dive into wildlife science more intensively in their late twenties. After several years dangling hundreds of feet up in the old-growth canopy of the Oregon Coast Range while surveying for tiny red tree voles, scouring the precipices of Glacier National Park for mountain goat scat, bushwhacking through the Klamath Mountains after Humboldt martens, and traversing the North Cascades setting cameras for wolverine, they are thrilled to be designing their own research. Salix is now a graduate student and a MITSI and National Needs Foundation Fellow at Northern Arizona University’s School of Forestry.

Their current research is on figuring out the full-taxa diet of Sierra Nevada Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes necator) in the Oregon Cascades. They are using next-generation sequencing of non-invasively collected scats to examine the vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant components of this endangered montane fox subspecies’ diet.

Salix is a white settler from the Jewish diaspora, a non-binary trans person, and deeply committed to and excited about doing their best to engage in collaborative anti-colonial science.