Ukiah Civic Center, City Council Chambers
07:00 PM - 08:00 PM on Tue, 21 May 2024
Dave Bengston on Attracting Birds to Your Yard
Tuesday, May 21, 2024 at 7PM - Ukiah City Council Chambers
Dave Bengston, Education Chair for Peregrine Audubon Society
Dave Bengston, one of Peregrine’s own board members and our Education Chair for
the last 16 years will be telling us how to attract birds into your yard and be
environmentally helpful at the same time. Topics will include native plants, cats,
window collisions, pest control, providing feed and water and nest boxes.
Dave grew up in Modesto, California where he collected feathers at an early age. In
college he gained a passion for plants and mushrooms. He graduated from the
University of California at Berkeley in 1971 with a degree in Social Sciences. In 1972,
he accepted a job with the Mendocino County Department of Agriculture and he
moved to Ukiah with the ulterior motive of studying mushrooms. He continued to have
an interest in plants, both on the job and in his personal life. He was a Nursery and
Seed Inspector and he was a charter member of the Sanhedrin Chapter of the Native
Plant Society. In 1990 he began to build birdhouses, a hobby he continues to this day.
He has been doing the Winter Feeder Watch for 22 years with Cornell University and
doing eBird for 15 years. For fifteen years, he has been volunteering his time to help
teach Flight School at Redwood Valley Outdoor Educational Project, and in more
recent years on bird hikes at the University Research Extension Center for the
University of California.
Dave served as Agricultural Commissioner and Sealer of Weights and Measures for
Mendocino County from 1989 until his retirement in 2009. During his tenure, he
enforced the laws pertaining to pesticides, exotic pests and quarantines, farmers
markets and the organic food laws, with pesticides being his primary focus. For his
entire career he was very active in biological control and he was always on the
statewide committee for biological control. He was chairman of the Biological Control
Committee three times and expanded and combined the committee to include
Integrated Pest Management; he presided over the state Biological Control Conference
in San Diego, a collaboration of governments, industry and the University of California.
He organized a statewide survey to prioritize weeds in every county, which convinced
U.S.D.A to make Yellow-star Thistle its top priority in California for biological control.
He was responsible for bringing several biological control agents into the county for the
control of invasive weeds. He was the head of the International Broom Initiative, which
was an effort to procure bio-control agents for the Brooms and Gorse. When the
county passed the ordinance to ban Genetically Modified Organisms, Bengston
became the first person in the country to enforce such an ordinance.
Dave lives in Ukiah with his wife Christy of 48 years and two of their grandchildren,
Andrew and Madeline. He continues to feed and photograph birds, go on nature hikes,
go on pelagic trips to see birds and build birdhouses.