Doug Hennick joined the Wild Fish Conservancy staff in 2014 after retiring from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), where he served as a fish habitat biologist and WDFW’s representative to salmon recovery committees in three Puget Sound watersheds. During that employment he developed so much respect for the research, habitat restoration, and advocacy work of WFC, and so much interest in the activities and potential of the region’s salmon recovery committees, that after retirement he volunteered to augment WFC’s representation on recovery committees. In this capacity he hopes to help the Puget Sound region adapt its salmon recovery plans to meet the challenges that have become evident during the first 15-years of their implementation.
WDFW was a second career for Doug; prior to that he served in the NOAA Corps for 20-years, which included work in fisheries oceanography and hydrography. Sandwiched between those two careers he worked for two years in stream ecology as a senior ecologist in King County government. He has a Master’s degree in Aquatic Science from Cornell University; as an undergraduate he studied biology at Stony Brook University. Doug was a Coast Guard officer early in his professional life, where he learned seamanship, which in turn led to his career in NOAA. His graduate work at Cornell guided him back to stream ecology. When Doug isn’t working for WFC, canoeing, or skiing, he helps his wife restore the Burrows Island lighthouse as part of her activities with the Northwest Schooner Society.