Peregrine Audubon Society to host Dave Bengston

Scott Travis

May 16

The Peregrine Audubon Society Program will be hosting Dave Bengston on Tuesday, May 21 from 7 to 8 p.m. in the Ukiah City Council Chambers.Dave Bengston, Peregrine Audubon Society board member, and Education Chair for the last 16 years, will be discussing 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 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.