Gabriela Peniche is the Scottish Raptor Monitoring Officer (SRMO).

Gaby has been in post since July 2024 taking care of the day-to-day running of the Scheme under the guidance of the SRMG. Gaby is hosted by BTO Scotland, based at Stirling University Innovation Park.

Gaby is an ecologist and veterinary nurse from Mexico. She has been living and working in the UK for almost 20 years. Her work has revolved mostly around animal reintroductions, animal health, and wildlife forensics from the little bumblebees and spiders through to white tail eagles and wolves.

Her most recent work brought her to Scotland where she wandered about the Highlands with the help of various members of the SRSG taking blood from golden eagles and looking into the health of all Scottish raptors. Looking at live and dead individuals the interest was to look at diseases and chemicals found in these predators at the top of the food chain to better understand how this could explain ecosystem health.

A more recent side branch of her conservation work before coming back to the raptor world, has been helping set up molecular laboratories in Africa and train people how to extract  DNA from elephant ivory, pangolins and many more endangered species to provide evidence in court against wildlife crime.

As the SRMO she wants to help the partners of the scheme and all its members continue with the incredible work they have been doing for over 20 years.  She finds that a very big perk of the job is to work very closely with all the raptor experts submitting data and learn from the huge raptor expertise that all those  involved in the scheme have to offer.