Julie Cotton

Julie was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where she spent my childhood enthralled by the urban wildlife that visited her family's yard. She spent her early teenage years convinced that, like a true Washingtonian, she needed to become a lawyer, but her love of biology prevailed, and by high school she was taking college-level marine science classes and interning at the National Zoo. She went to Washington University in St. Louis for her undergraduate major in Environmental Studies (focused on ecology) and minor in Anthropology. While in St. Louis, she began volunteering at Wild Bird Rehabilitation, a local songbird rehabilitation clinic, and she continued her field studies with an internship doing research in a gull colony. She joined the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at UC Davis in 2011 to pursue a graduate degree in animal behavior. Before she even moved to Davis, she knew she wanted to continue volunteering in wildlife rehabilitation, so she contacted Bret Stedman at the California Raptor Center and was lucky enough to begin volunteering in her first quarter of grad school. She earned her Master's Degree in 2014 (while still a CRC volunteer), worked for a year at the Lindsay Wildlife Experience in Walnut Creek as an educational interpreter, and began her official position at the CRC in the beginning of 2017.