Richard D. Spight
Founder and Board Member Emeritus

Dick graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Fish and Wildlife. He is now semi-retired from a career in communications and development. His long held belief is that uncontrolled human population growth will be the end of many species of wildlife. This belief led him to focus on islands where habitats can make all the difference. His focus is primarily on fundraising for the Foundation.

Eddie Bartley
President

Eddie is the co-owner and lead naturalist of a natural history company called Nature Trip, and past owner and president of Affinitel Communications. He is actively involved with many natural history and science based institutions including the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, Golden Gate Audubon Society, California Academy of Sciences, and is Vice-president of Yerba Buena Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. Eddie is inspired by the important work of the Farallon Islands Foundation and looks forward to furthering these efforts in the future.

Jerry H. Daniel 
Recording Secretary

Jerry graduated from the University of Tennessee in Engineering, and spent more that 40 years working in the space, nuclear, and energy fields. His island interest started with helping supply the Farallon Islands research station. He is especially interested in removal of non-endemic species and improvement of island habitat.

Kelsey M. Fitzgerald
Website Manager

Judith A. Fortney
Investments

A graduate of London University and Duke University, Judith has spent more than 30 years working in international public health. A demographer by training, she has a long standing interest in the impact of population growth on the environment and species extinction. Judith’s main interest in islands is the impact of restoration and maintenance of habitat on birdlife. She is responsible for the Foundation’s investments.

Robert A. Lewis
Treasurer

A graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology and Princeton University in Organic Chemistry, Bob spent over 30 years working in the energy field in the US and Europe. He has been interested in birds and bird conservation since the '70s, and has been an adult education instructor in these areas since the early '90s. Travel to island locations in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Alaska and Hawaii served to reinforce Bob’s perception of the uniqueness and vulnerability of island eco-systems, and the accelerating need to preserve them..

Mark Rauzon
Science Advisor

Mark James Rauzon is a tenured geography professor at Laney College, Oakland. He is also a seabird biologist, specializing in the effects and eradication of invasive animals and plants on tropical islands to enhance populations of threatened seabirds. He has worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, US Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps in the Pacific. The experiences were used to write Isles of Amnesia- the history, geography and restoration of America’s forgotten Pacific islands, published in 2016. He also authored Isles of Refuge; Wildlife and History of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (both published by the University of Hawaii Press); winner of the 2002 award for Excellence in Writing Nonfiction. He is also the author of over 20 nonfiction science books for children including the Reading Rainbow book, Water, Water, Everywhere (Sierra Club Jr. Books); now 25 years in print. A founding board member of the Friends of Sausal Creek, an Oakland-based community creek advocacy that is 25 years old, for which he was recognized as a ‘Local Hero” by Oakland City Council in 2020. Rauzon designed the cormorant platforms that successfully attracted birds from the old to the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and is designing seabird habitat for the old Berkeley Pier. He is a research associate with the Point Blue Conservation Science and has received the Special Achievement Award from the Pacific Seabird Group in 2006, and Paul Covel Award for Conservation and Education in 2022 from the Golden Gate Audubon Society.