After Humboldt, Sacha went on to earn a PhD at University of California at Davis.

  For her Humboldt thesis, Sacha thought about ways in which birds contribute to the restoration of their own breeding habitat. She approached one aspect of this broader question by investigating whether insectivorous birds indirectly affect black cottonwood sapling growth by reducing leaf damage via herbivorous insect consumption. She studied these interactions along three tributaries to Mono Lake, California where riparian breeding birds and the habitat on which they depend are recovering from decades of municipal water diversions.