Born in the small mountain town of Salida, Colorado and raised in the midwest, I caught my first snake when I was six, cloned paramecia at 14, dropped out of high school while working with ecologists at a local college and published my first research while an undergrad...
Storyteller
First and foremost I am storyteller ...favorite stories come from remote places and have seldom been heard before. Some concern my research; others, discoveries by colleagues...
Some required me to use my wits... scrambling up a tree to escape bull elephants... nearly being knocked out of another tree by a bear... using blowguns to defend against drug lords... joining a team to find a record number of snake species in one place... avoiding being kidnapped in Iran... enjoying scorpions, spiders, centipedes, beetle grubs and rats with native peoples (the topic of a Gourmet magazine article about me)...
... accidentally sitting on the deadliest snake of the Americas, a fer-de-lance.
(A cartoon of this last event, below, was published in the National Geographic.)
I am one of a lucky few to receive a PhD under poet of biology EO Wilson, one of the warmest, most equality-minded and principled scientists I have ever met. Ed kindly spoke about me on CSPAN. Back in 2009 I presented Ed with a sculpture of one of my photographs as his lifetime achievement award from the Explorers Club. Read my tribute to Ed here.
