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) ccidentally sitting on the deadliest snake of the Americas, a fer-de-lance. (A cartoon of this last event, to the right, was published in 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.
In 2009 I presented Ed with a sculpture of one of my photographs as his lifetime achievement award from the Explorers Club (right). Read my tribute to Ed here.
Another mentor was Irven DeVore, who started off studying primates but shifted to working on San Bushmen. Each year Irv put together a "Simian Seminar" at his home on Hurlbut Street to which I was invited, giving me the pleasure of joining the leading anthropologists of the day.
I continued talking to Irv about hunter-gatherers long after he retired -- to find him looking ever more wizardly!
