Chris West is the assistant regional wildlife biologist for Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife out of the Jonesboro office. Chris began birding when she was a teenager growing up in New Hampshire’s White Mountains National Forest. Since the early 1990s she has lived in Maine and worked on many different bird surveys throughout the state. She has also spent time on the West Coast volunteering on bird projects, and almost a year on the Gulf of Mexico assessing colonial waterbirds for oil following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Her home is in Orland where she lives near her son, and with her dog, on the eastern channel of the Penobscot River.