Delta Student Profile: Tim Kimmel
Love of Hunting, Outdoors Spurred Young Researcher
My curiosity in the outdoors started when I watched my first hunting shows on television. I was astonished at the excitement hunting brought to people. I knew my dad had hunted when he was younger, so I began pestering him to tell me what it was like. It had been years since he had hunted partly because neither my older brother nor my sister had taken any interest in hunting. My mother was definitely not outdoor savvy, though she certainly encouraged my enthusiasm for the outdoors.
When my dad soon succumbed to the pressure and took me fishing on a lake by our house, my curiosity quickly turned into a passion for the outdoors, and I knew this was the field for me. My dad started me hunting with trips for white-tailed deer – some of the more abundant game near where I grew up in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Those early deer hunts made me want to hunt just about everything. Looking back, it was nice to be able to get my dad back into something that he once loved to do.
When I turned 18, I got a job at our local Gander Mountain store where I met duck enthusiasts Jim O’Brien and Matt Buck. They invited me to tag along one day and do some goose banding with guys from the state agency, the Pennsylvania Game Commission. I thought catching and banding geese was one of the greatest things in the world. That same summer I landed an internship with the Game Commission under Joe Stefko, Wildlife Education Supervisor, and was able to meet a lot of people including Kevin Jacobs, the waterfowl biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, who I learned was a Delta grad.
That fall my cousin Nick Hayden, an avid waterfowl hunter, took me on my first duck hunt at a swamp bottom close to our house. It was raining and greenheads were circling over just waiting to land in that swamp. I harvested my first mallard and was instantly hooked. After that I never missed opening day of duck hunting with my good friend Jim. We would leave the house at about midnight, drive two hours to our spot, sleep in the truck for an hour, set the decoys, and then wait in the boat until sunrise. Sometimes we shot ducks and sometime we didn’t, but it was the excitement of preparing and gearing up for the first day that made it all worth it.
To this day I still get together with three other buddies and have a Christmas duck hunt in Pennsylvania. It is the camaraderie I enjoy the most on those hunts. I will never forget the times that we had and look forward to the many more to come.
My friends Jim and Matt had recognized my excitement for duck hunting and asked me to be a part of their Delta Waterfowl Whistling Wings chapter as a committee member. We did banquets, started a youth duck hunt, and built, installed and monitored both wood duck boxes and hen houses. It was from my buddy Jim, chairmen of the chapter, that I learned about the field technicians Delta hired every summer.
By then I was a wildlife student at California University of Pennsylvania, so I decided to try my luck and apply for one of the positions. When I received a call from Matt Pieron offering me a position I gladly accepted. I had an amazing summer working on the prairies in North Dakota, and learned more than I ever could have imagined about ducks. Of course, I also swapped stories with the other technicians who were also avid waterfowlers.
During that next fall a friend, John Scagline, and I started the Monongahela chapter. That following summer I obtained another technician position with Delta where I worked with graduate student Courtney Amundson who was studying survival of mallard broods.
Those two summers as a technician taught me a lot about Delta Waterfowl and its mission. It was nice to see an organization that geared its focus towards students and research to solve waterfowl problems. I knew that my interest for waterfowl and my eagerness to continue my education would be a perfect fit for this non-profit organization.
Those two summers at Delta laid the groundwork for my own start on a Delta-supported research project with Dr. Frank Rohwer at Louisiana State University. My project actually builds on work started by the students I worked for in prior years. We now have a sample of well over 1,000 mallard hens that we captured at nest sites in North Dakota. We are following these hens to look at how female age influences breeding and how faithful females are to their nest sites.
If it wasn’t for my amazing family, close friends in the wildlife field, outstanding advisors, and an unbelievable girlfriend, I would not be where I am at today. I cannot thank these people enough for lighting the path for me and showing me that I can do anything I put my mind too. Someone once told me that it is not the things in life that make you who you are; it’s the people in your life. Needless to say, I am very fortunate.