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9/8/25 Update - Unfortunately, due to our speaker's illness, we have to cancel our Monday, Sept 8, Club meeting.

We will re-schedule our speaker, Marcella Kelly, for a later date, probably in 2026.

We apologize for this late notice and thank you for your understanding.

The Highlands Bird & Nature Club hold their next meeting on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, 7 pm, at the Highland Center in Monterey. 

Marcella Kelly, Ph.D. will be speaking about the Appalachian Carnivore Project.

 Marcella Kelly came to Virginia Tech in 2001 after completing her PhD degree at the University of California at Davis in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology. She works on carnivore populations in the US and abroad. In Virginia, Dr. Kelly and her team began a project in 2011 on coyotes in the central Appalachian Mountains (Bath and Rockingham Counties). That project expanded to the Virginia Appalachian Carnivore Project (VACS) in 2016 and focused on black bears, bobcats, and coyotes, and their potential impacts on deer populations, primarily in Bath County, VA. 

Currently, her team is working on understanding the impacts of Sarcoptic mange in black bears via use of hair snares in a high mange prevalent area (Alleghany, Bath, Botetourt, and Rockbridge Counties) and a no-mange area (Grayson, Smyth, and Wythe Counties). She combines non-invasive methods (e.g. camera traps, hair snares) with more traditional means (e.g. wildlife capture and GPS collaring) to better understand population dynamics of elusive carnivore species.