David Torfeh

David Torfeh has had a fascination with birds, native plants, butterflies, and mammals since childhood. He has led many Audubon Society bird walks and park district nature hikes in Ventura County, California for a number of years. He coordinates and sometimes leads field trips for the local Channel Islands chapter of the California Native Plant Society. David has worked for various environmental consulting firms as a biologist.

In 2017, after leading a lengthy field data gathering effort, he co-authored with Karl Novak — of Ventura County Watershed Protection — a successful raptor pilot study replacing anticoagulant rodenticide use on ground squirrels that burrow into levees and dams with perches and owl boxes that attract birds of prey to hunt rodents at problem sites. For the next four years, David coordinated this raptor program’s implementation, controlling burrowing rodents naturally in southern Ventura County. Several other California jurisdictions requested information and began their own raptor programs.

David volunteered for Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology avian point counts and a Least Bell’s Vireo predation assessment from 2016 through 2018 and became a biologist with the organization at the beginning of 2022. He has participated in general bird inventories, nest surveys/nest monitoring, locating sensitive species, point count data entry, and restoration site biomonitoring in that capacity.