Dr. Elizabeth Loos - Research Director

After many years as a counselor for troubled children, Elizabeth Loos returned to college to get her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  When Liz came to Delta as field assistant in 1996, she had a hard time telling the difference between a female Blue-winged Teal and a hen Mallard when they flushed from their nests.  Although she was anticipating an interesting experience working at Delta, she didn’t expect the summer to change the course of her life.  It didn’t take long for Liz to fall in love with the prairies and ducks.  Liz’s Master’s research involved using temperature probes, coupled to miniature data loggers, to document patterns of nest attendance of hundreds of Blue-winged Teal.  Her Master’s research on incubation ecology of teal at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University was funded by Delta.  During her first summer as a field assistant at Delta, Liz became intrigued by the paradox of incubation prior to clutch completion and the synchronous hatching of ducklings in a nest.  She focused her Delta-funded doctoral research at University of Louisiana at Lafayette on the mechanisms of hatching synchrony and the impacts of hatching synchrony on the number of eggs a duck lays in her nest.

Liz loves chasing ducks around on the prairies during the breeding season, but is a little less enamored with the 2AM wake-up call for duck hunting on the Atchafalaya Delta in Louisiana.  Early fall duck hunting in Towner County, North Dakota, near her house in Egeland, is much more to her liking.  Her hunting is less for the love of the hunt than the joys of watching her dog, Dakota, retrieve.  Liz is committed to the mission of Delta Waterfowl Foundation and is thrilled to be directing Delta’s research program with her husband, Dr. Frank Rohwer.