May 24, 2014 4 min read

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that Dr. Carol Bocetti, an associate professor at California University, has been honored as a Recovery Champion award winner for Region 5. It is the second time in the past three years Bocetti has been so honored, making her just the second person to be honored twice.

“I found out it was just me and one woman who have won the award twice,” said Bocetti with a laugh. “That was pretty cool.”

The award is given to Fish and Wildlife Service employees and its partners who have made outstanding efforts to help threatened or endangered fish, wildlife and plant species reach the point where they are secure in the wild and no longer need protection.

Bocetti, who has been with California University since 2004, was honored for her work with the Delmarva Fox Squirrel Recovery Team.

The team, which includes game and fisheries employees from Delaware, Virginia and Maryland along with professors from a number of schools, has helped re-establish the Delmarva (short for Delaware, Maryland and Virginia) fox squirrel populations in the penninsula area between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Delmarva fox squirrels now inhabit 28 percent of that area and number 20,000.

In conjunction with establishing additional Delmarva fox squirrel populations on national wildlife refuges and state lands, the Team engaged private landowners as indispensable partners in recovery initiatives throughout the range of the endangered subspecies.

Obviously, the work can be challenging and time consuming, especially when you also hold a full-time teaching position, but Bocetti finds the time.

“That’s what summers are for,” she said. “But everybody does it. All of the professors have some kind of project.”

The Delmarva fox squirrel, which once had a range that included southeastern Pennsylvania, was listed as an endangered species in 1967 with only 10 percent of its historical population remaining.

Bocetti, a member of the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at California, has been working with the team since 1995.

Through efforts of Bocetti and other members of her team, the Fish and Wildlife Service expects to remove the Delmarva fox squirrel from the list of endangered species, saying it is “confident of its sustained viability” in the wild.

But that doesn’t mean their work is done. Bocetti and her group will continue to monitor the squirrels for at least another five to 10 years to ensure its recovery is sustained.

“I think the amount of work will decrease after the delisting,” Bocetti said. “I’ll probably be doing some small projects with them as well because they are just so charming.”

Bocetti’s first Recovery Champion award was received in 2011 for her conservation work as leader of the Kirtland’s Warbler Recovery Team, a project on which she has worked since 1986 and was appointed team leader in 2006. That once-endangered songbird, breeding only in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario, also has been brought back from the brink of extinction.

“The mentoring potential in both the classroom and in the field is currently the highlight of my professional life,” Bocetti said. “I was so excited to learn I’d again received this award.”

Bocetti, an Ohio State graduate with a Ph.D. in zoology, joined California after spending 18 years as a researcher in the field of conservation biology and wildlife ecology. She involves her students in her research, including her work with Delmarva fox squirrels.

“I am not aware of a Recovery Champion chosen with so few years between the awards,” says Ann Haas, an endangered species program specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Although Dr. Bocetti is not unique in this recognition, she is surely a rarity. She deserves applause for sharing her expertise for the benefit of another species in another region.”

Outdoors Editor F. Dale Lolley can be reached at dlolley@observer-reporter.com.