​Dana Miller-Blair has been birding and photographing birds since retiring from the practice of medicine in 2017. Her first mentor was Rich Howard who taught a class on birds of the American River Parkway at Effie Yeaw Nature Center in 2018. Since then, she has made several birdwatching trips to Central and South America. Her first trip to Colombia will be in February 2026. Although Dana is relatively new to the world of birdwatching, she comes from a family of natural scientists. Her grandfather, ornithologist Aiden Holmes Miller, a former director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, conducted extensive field research on Zonotrichia Sparrows during his 1957-58 sabbatical (funded by a Guggenheim grant). He worked primarily at a research station at 6500 feet elevation in the mountains west of California. He explored regions like the central Andes and Amazon Basin including the Putumayo Jungle. Miller's Colombian sabbatical significantly advanced understanding of tropical bird ecology and enriched the MVZ collections, highlighing his pioneering work in avian biology. Dana is excited to explore some of the regions in which her grandfather worked, and to learn more about the research he did in Colombia.

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