Karina Garcia

Karina Garcia has birds on the brain.

It’s been that way for the East Salinas native and 2009 graduate of Alisal High School since 2014, when she earned her bachelor’s degree in molecular environmental biology from UC Berkeley and started doing internships and “random biology jobs, which there aren’t many of,” she says.

She worked as a biology monitor with the Resource Conservation District of Monterey County, which helps farmers develop and utilize conservation-based practices. It brought her into contact with David Gonthier, a post-doctoral researcher from Cal who was doing a biodiversity study of strawberries in Salinas and Watsonville. He hired her to collect and sort insects; when he departed for a position at the University of Kentucky, she followed and he became her thesis adviser as she studies how birds provide service and disservice to agriculture.

Now 28, Garcia grew up with her mom and an older brother, who also graduated from UC Berkeley and works as a computer programmer, and a younger sister, who’s now 11. In Kentucky, she lives with her boyfriend, Salinas-native Rafael Estrada, a game designer and painter whose medium is oils.

Weekly: Tell me about your experience of going to Berkeley and how going there helped inform what you’re doing now.

Garcia: I graduated from Alisal High School and won the Berkeley Incentive Award, which helps with the application process and, in addition to financial aid, covers funding for all four years in school. When I first went to UC, I had the intention of being pre-med, and then when I got there I realized that’s not what I wanted to do at all. I took my first spider biology class, and I used to be afraid of them, but in the class I had to collect a bunch. I had to collect at least 50 species and we went out on a couple of collecting trips.

From there, I volunteered with a post-doc researcher who was studying bluebirds in California vineyards and how they increased pest suppression because bluebirds eat insects and pests.

Were you into science at Alisal High?

Not really. I was more into my English classes and I really like reading. Everyone thought I was going to be an English major.

When you decided to get your Ph.D., how did you go about it?

It was mostly based on advice from Dave [Gonthier]. He didn’t think it was necessary for me to go through a master’s first, and there’s more funding for Ph.Ds. I applied for a National Science Foundation grant, which I got in 2018 for $138,000, and wrote my proposal to study services and disservices of birds on agriculture.

So with that grant, I got three years of funding for my program. Without it, I would have only had a stipend of $19,000 a year from my department, which isn’t a lot. Now I can buy groceries.

How do you study the birds?

My first year in 2017 was funded by the bird project we’re working on, with a lot of different universities, including UC Davis, Riverside and University of Washington. What we did this summer and last is bird surveys, with 20 study sites, 20 farms that varied in management and landscape diversity, including how much natural habitat they had.

At each farm I did bird counts – I took a 50-meter radius and wrote down all the birds I heard and saw. I had to learn a lot of bird calls. I also did mist netting, which is a fine mesh net birds can’t see. They fly into them, and then we extract them, take blood and fecal samples to do a diet analysis to see which birds are eating strawberries and which are acting as pest control agents.

We’re also trying to see if birds are carrying pathogens that cause foodborne illness, like E. coli. There’s a lot of negativity toward wildlife and pressure on farmers to remove birds from farms by removing habitat, but we want to see if that has to be the case.

You have three years left on your Ph.D. What’s your plan for when you’re finished?

I’m leaning toward not staying in academia. I would want to come back to Salinas and maybe work with a conservation-based nonprofit. I would hope to inform farm management practices as an adviser. I like to do research in Salinas because you see things through a different lens. You get to meet a lot of cool people and hear their stories.

I miss my favorite spots in Salinas, like La Plaza Bakery.