“A friend of mine – Chris Dick – who is now at the University of Michigan, was once bitten by a Fer-de-lance, which is a serious venomous snake. And the next vehicle was coming only three days later. One of the Mateiros – that’s Portugese for forest men – walked 20-30 km, I think, out to the road, then hitched a ride to the nearest town, and called for help. But till help arrived, Chris was just lying in a hammock with his foot swelling continuously. A funny story here – another mateiro, who had been bitten previously by a Fer-de-lance, offered to spit in Chris’s mouth, because he believed that would cure him. Chris says that he refused, but as his foot kept swelling and swelling and there was no sign of help, he was beginning to consider letting him do it!”

“A number of the langur monkeys had distinctive traits (a bit of earlobe missing, or an odd tail) but others could be hard to identify. So I poured purple ink into a spray bottle and then sat quietly among the langurs, waiting for a chance to spray whoever I needed extra help identifying.”

“A typical day would start with preparing the food for the animals. Then I would check survival of the animals, transfer them to new jars, count the number of babies released since last check and feed all animals. This would take between 3 and 6 hours a day. The biggest work was to quantify parasite growth inside the host. The transmission stages of the parasite are tiny (about 2 microns in length) and one needs to take care not to overlook them. I spent many days on the microscope.”

“Al and Ray raced lizards on Ray’s racetrack and measured the thermal dependence of speed. The daily routine involved racing many lizards many times, extracting the fastest speed of each run. It was not very exciting, but the Talking Heads and the Rolling Stones eased the tedium.”

“Anybody who sets up a microcosm or mesocosm experiment struggles with two things: one is this desire to mimic nature – in your chamber or in your bottle; to capture nature in miniature. But at the other end of that spectrum, you just want a biological analog to test an idea you have. If you think that biodiversity matters, for primary productivity or carbon sequestration, then you simply want to have biodiversity that varies from low to high, and not worry about species identities. Also, we needed to pick species that would survive in the Ecotron. In preparation for the experiment, for a couple of years, we tried out lots of candidate plants in a mock chamber, and picked the ones that survived best. But then you will always get the people who say – why did you put that species with that species when they don’t co-occur in nature? So we did the best we could, given these constraints. We chose what John Lawton used to call the “weedy meadow” as the model for our communities. Apart from plants, we also wanted other trophic levels, to simulate a real biological community – decomposers, herbivores, predators of the herbivores, and a below-ground community including Collembola and mites and earthworms. We also wanted soil bacteria, for which we took soil from the meadow, shook it up in water and then filtered the water, so that the bacteria could go through, but all the little insects and other invertebrates get removed. What we finally had was very simple – a patchwork community with all the ingredients. But it wasn’t nature in a bottle. Rather, it was all the processes of nature in a bottle. We had people coming to see the Ecotron all the time, and most of them were disappointed. [...] I think people expected to see some sort of miniature rainforest inside the Ecotron, with maybe parrots flying out! Once we had the local gardening club visit us, because John Lawton thought we should have good relations with our neighbours. I remember there was this group of gardening enthusiasts standing around, all eager to see what’s inside, and when I opened the door they were all shocked. One elderly gentleman looked at it and said: “That’s a gardener’s nightmare!” I will never forget that. What he saw were weedy plants and slugs and aphids and white flies; all these pests. To us, thinking abstractly, it had all the essential ingredients to of an ecological community, and was beautiful. [...] We also had to vary diversity within each of the trophic levels in different treatments. That presented a special challenge, because we had to be really careful about always going from low to medium to high diversity when working in the chambers. Because if you went from high to low, there was the risk of accidentally introducing a new species – some tiny aphid in your hair or on your clothes – into the low diversity treatments. So we wore these Hazmat suits and slippers whenever we were in the chambers. The other thing was we couldn’t open a chamber after three o clock in the afternoon because the sun had set in our artificial communities. And it was a real sunset – we actually shifted the red to far-red, and dimmed the lights to get the right balance to mimic a sunset. So, if we opened a chamber door after the sunset, all this light would come in, and there were a lot of plants that would respond to that, and it could alter their flowering and growth patterns. So, at three pm every day, the buzzers would go off, warning us that the sun was setting, and we would always be behind, so we would have to rush to complete whatever we were doing and get out. The other thing was the rain – again we had buzzers warning us that the rain was about to start, and we had to get ourselves and all our equipment out quickly before they got drenched!”

“Blue jays are difficult to work with in the laboratory because they’re very wired. They’re very intense. If you catch them as adults, they never tame, they never relax in captivity. They will beat themselves up on the wires. So what we have done – this is the way Al Kamil developed it years ago — was that you find a blue jay nest and you go and watch it for the point at which the young hatch, and you look for the moment at which the nestling’s eyes are just opening. It’s about 10 days after they hatch. At that point, you take the babies out of the nest, bring them to the lab and then you hand-feed them. Essentially, they associate people with food for the rest of their lives. But they never get pleasant about it. They don’t like you and they will bite you on a regular basis, but they do behave properly in the apparatus. So, they were locally caught here in Lincoln. Some of the best places are nests in people’s backyards, or there are several parks and graveyards. Cemeteries are very good for blue jays and we’ve picked a number of them from there.”

“Devising a means to change the coloration of birds was one of the most challenging parts of my research. Making birds redder was not so hard. There were red art markers that would increase plumage redness. But I also wanted to decrease redness, which was not easy and for which there were no published methods. I tried calling experts in bird coloration around the country like Sievert Rohwer at the University of Washington and Ken Parkes at the University of Pittsburgh. All of the senior zoologists who I contacted encouraged me to do the experiments, but they had no useful advice to offer regarding how to lighten the red coloration of finches. I was starting to think that I would have to abandon the experiment or do it only by adding red to feathers when it suddenly occurred to me who I needed to consult: the real experts in manipulating the color of integument, beauticians. I looked in the phone book, found the address for a beauty supply shop, and drove over. It was both a salon and store, and those women really were experts on manipulating coloration. And when I explained my research project, they were extremely sharp and insightful consultants. In retrospect, I should have taken down their names and acknowledged them in the paper.”

“Devising a means to change the coloration of birds was one of the most challenging parts of my research. Making birds redder was not so hard. There were red art markers that would increase plumage redness. But I also wanted to decrease redness, which was not easy and for which there were no published methods. I tried calling experts in bird coloration around the country like Sievert Rohwer at the University of Washington and Ken Parkes at the University of Pittsburgh. All of the senior zoologists who I contacted encouraged me to do the experiments, but they had no useful advice to offer regarding how to lighten the red coloration of finches. I was starting to think that I would have to abandon the experiment or do it only by adding red to feathers when it suddenly occurred to me who I needed to consult: the real experts in manipulating the color of integument - beauticians. I looked in the phone book, found the address for a beauty supply shop, and drove over. It was both a salon and store, and those women really were experts on manipulating coloration. And when I explained my research project, they were extremely sharp and insightful consultants. In retrospect, I should have taken down their names and acknowledged them in the paper. They set me up with a strong hair lightener that was designed to remove melanin pigmentation from hair and that I hoped would remove carotenoids from feathers. Fortuitously, non-traditional hair colors were popular by the 1980s in Ann Arbor, so they had permanent, scarlet red hair dyes. It all worked amazingly well, but it was a rather harsh experimental treatment for the birds. First, because birds coat their feather with oil from their uropygial gland, I knew I would have to strip oil off the feathers for dye to adhere to the feather substrate. So, I had to lightly shampoo the feathers of the birds before the color treatment. Getting birds wet to the skin is dangerous because they lose all insulation and can go hypothermic very fast, so I used warm water and worked fast. Immediately after the shampoo treatment, the birds either had red dye or hair lightener worked into their feathers. Both of these products had to be left on the feathers for 15 minutes to set, so I would wrap the bodies of the birds from the neck down in plastic wrap and then set the birds on a heat pad to keep them warm. The heat also helped the dyes and lighteners work. Finally, I had to rinse out the dye or lightener and then let the birds dry, fluff, and preen. Again, wet birds are at serious risk of hypothermia even in a relatively warm room, so I put the birds in cages in front of heat lamps. Heat lamps were dangerous for birds because a small bird can go from warm to over-heated very fast. To avoid that, I shielded half of the cage from the lamp so birds could move out of the heat if they got uncomfortable. The whole process worked really well and I didn’t lose a single bird during this dying process. I held the birds overnight to recover and within a few hours of the last rinse, they were fluffed and preened and looked like normal house finches again. Since that experiment, I have run several experiments with my students in which we increased the coloration of red, yellow, and blue species with art markers, but I have never gone back to the dye treatment.”

“During my graduate student years we were renting cabins from RMBL [Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory] and eating some meals in the communal dining hall. No running water in the one-room cabin, a wood-burning cook stove for heat, and no telephones in Gothic. One morning in spring we woke up to find lines of snow on our sleeping bag that had blown in through the cracks in the wooden walls (at 2,900m). It was a 2-minute walk from my cabin to my research lab, which was mostly used for storing field gear, and to the field site for that experimental study. I was usually out in the field by 8, and worked until close to dinner (6 PM in the dining hall when we ate there). There’s also an active seminar program at RMBL, and a group of grad students who often got together to talk, so a few nights a week scientists would get together. Towards the end of my PhD work I had occasional assistance. For my first three year in graduate school I had a fellowship ($300/month) from the National Defense Education Act, and in 1974 got an NSF grant for improving doctoral dissertation research in the field sciences (“Resource partitioning, niche breadth and niche overlap of bumblebees in two high altitude sites in Colorado.” 1974-76, $2,900). That helped to pay the summer field station expenses, and for occasional assistance I think. In 1976 I got my first real NSF grant, for work on an unrelated project (ants and plants). Another important aspect of working at RMBL is that it’s always been family-friendly, so each summer my wife and kids would travel to CO with me. One son met his wife there, and is now (as a Professor at Florida State University, as is his wife) collaborating with me on some research projects there. My father was a physician and used to volunteer as a camp doctor for a couple of weeks in the summer as his vacation, to see me and my family. I now have a granddaughter spending summers there; I think her parents want to give her the experience her father had of growing up there in the summers.”

“I conducted this research with the assistance of six undergraduates. They were students in a class that I taught, Field Studies in Animal Behavior, the duration of which coincided with the elephant seal breeding season. I trained them to read tags (from a blind) and observe the behaviors under study (who dominates whom, who fights and wins and loses, who mates, etc.). With this crew, we made observations every day during the breeding season. I spent every weekend on the island study site (Thursday or Friday to Monday) and lectured during the week. We had bunk beds and cooking space in two buildings on the former, abandoned lighthouse on the island. We carried in our own water and food. We used an outdoor privy (with a great view). We crossed the dangerous and harrowing channel in an Avon inflatable raft powered by a 15 hp outboard motor engine. We got to the launching site in an old 4-wheel former military truck that John Wayne might have used.”

“I did much of this study in the laboratory back at the University of California, Berkeley, but in order to carry out the experiment, I had to collect litter and soils from Toolik Lake, Alaska. Collecting litter and soils in Arctic tundra is very different from collecting them in any other sort of ecosystem. The plants I was collecting were tiny, and I needed to collect dead stems, recently senesced leaf litter, and roots. I had to devise different methods of collecting material for each species. The species I remember best was Vaccinium vitis-idaea, or lingonberry, a dwarf shrub. Its leaves are tiny, about half a centimeter long. The species is evergreen and when the leaves senesce, which happens throughout the summer, they remain on the tiny branches. To collect them, I had to lie on the tundra and use a tweezers to gently tug at senesced leaves, one by one. I only collected those that had clearly abscised, so that they easily came free from the branch. Often they would fall at the touch of my tweezers, so I would try to retrieve the fallen leaves from in between the mosses and lichens. I remember spending days lying on the ground collecting leaf litter. I think I listened to a Walkman to pass the time. Much of the time I wore bright yellow rain gear, because the ground is very wet in the tundra since the permafrost impedes drainage. I recall that the folks in camp at the Toolik Research Station could see me across the lake, essentially motionless on the ground, and they couldn’t figure out why I appeared to be lying still in the tundra for hours on end. I had to use tiny scissors to trim dead branch tips for the same species. I collected senesced leaf litter of the sedge species the same way, since these species’ leaves senesce from the tips of the blades downward to the base. I felt like I was giving the Eriophorum vaginatum tussocks a haircut, as I trimmed individual blades to separate senesced from live tissue. Separating roots from peat is a pain in the neck because the only way to do it is to carefully pull the peat away from the roots. The Ericaceous species have such fine roots that it took a long time to get sufficient mass to carry out the experiment. So all in all, it was a pretty tedious process.”

“I did not have a laboratory set up there. I stayed there much of the time, but I would periodically go back to Harvard, to deal with all the data, to deal with identifications, and in one case course work, and then I would fly back again. I had rented a house, and the house was my laboratory. Every morning when I was down there, when the weather wasn’t too bad, I would go to a particular marina depending on which island I was planning to work on, go to the island for the whole day and come back. I learnt a lot about using small motors navigating them. That’s what I did. It was very intensive fieldwork.”

“I had been working in the Aleutians for more than 25 years at the time. And we were in the field every day from morning till evening. I usually worked with a team of four people during the later years. Early on, during the 70s and up to the early 80s, it was usually just two of us, and then after that it was commonly four. So, there were a lot of people, over a lot of days, over a lot of years, and when you sum it all up, the number of person hours in the field becomes very large.”

“I made radio-transmitters with little waistbands that were designed so that when the waistband stretched the pulse rate of the radio would change. Using this I hoped to get remote data on how much the bat had fed. I made the device, put it on the bat and it worked. But, I also had to make holes in the membranes of the bat’s wing to get the waistband on and it would still slide off the bat’s belly when it fed. I eventually decided it was too intrusive. The main advantage today would be better video technology, but doing what I did would still be hard – you still need to get into the hollow, and keep the bats in view, which often requires squirming around inside the roost. So, I think what Gerald Carter did – work with a good captive population – is the way forward.”

“I remember on the first day of fieldwork I had failed to take insect repellent with me. As soon as I entered the first forest patch I was ambushed by mosquitoes so I had to make a hasty retreat to get better prepared. I remember that I really enjoyed being in the woods by myself early in the morning. I remember climbing over fences with a backpack full of field gear. I worked alone except for one day during the trapping period when my sisters were in town and they wanted to come with me. That was a bad idea. I was doing the removal experiment for recruitment estimation, which meant I had to move the captured mice to another woodlot several km away. My sisters seemed incapable of opening a trap without letting the mouse go, so this created a bit of a blip in my data.”

“I spent the whole time – every day, all day – watching butterflies. I almost never went into town, except to get shopping at the end of the day. I would just wander around with a net and a notebook and a stopwatch. That’s all I used. The first thing I did was to mark a lot of individuals so they could be recognised. I remember being delighted how easy this was compared to trying to catch pied wagtails. I would see a butterfly in a sunny spot, capture it in a net and mark it with felt tip pen through the net. I didn’t actually have to handle the butterfly at all. This way I marked several hundred during the study. On my first day I decided to watch one individual for the whole day, just to try and get a feel for what it was like to be a speckled wood butterfly. I watched one male for six hours or so, in one little sunny patch. As the sun moved across the sky, the sunny patch moved over the woodland floor, and the male followed it faithfully, travelling something like 20 or 30 metres during the day, always staying in his little sunny spot. I noticed that he didn’t spend any time feeding there. He just perched and whenever anything came close by he would sally out and inspect it. Often it was another insect, perhaps a ladybird or another species of butterfly, and he’d then very quickly ignore it and return to his perch. But if it was another speckled wood butterfly he was very interested. If it was a male, they would have a brief spiral flight, and then one of them would retreat. It was always the owner who would come back to the territory. If it was a female he would follow and court her, but almost always she said no. She would fold her wings and depart, and he would then leave her alone. Subsequently, I discovered that these females which said ‘No’, were already mated and laying eggs. In butterflies, females can say ‘No’ and that is the end of it. There is nothing the male can do. But occasionally, a female would say ‘Yes’ and the male would then leave the territory and fly up and mate with her up in the canopy. These simple observations suggested to me that what the male was doing in these sunny spots was looking out for females. The next question I asked was whether these little chase, these little spiral flights, were territory defence. You might think, well it is obvious they must be! But there was some controversy back in the 60s and 70s about whether butterflies really did defend territories or whether these little interactions were simply a case of butterflies spacing out amongst the available habitat. So I thought it was very important to test whether these other intruding butterflies really wanted to settle in the territories. So I removed the original owners, kept them in a net, and when one of these butterflies from the canopy came down I saw what they did. I discovered that in all cases where I had removed an owner, the new comer settled in the territory and began to defend it. And that suggested to me that these spiral flights had previously kept them out, so it really was territory defence. I was very pleased with that very simple removal experiment; these other butterflies were clearly keen to get the territories when the vacancy arose.”

“I started my finch project in the summer of 1987, capturing wild birds in backyards around the area to create a captive flock in the rooftop aviary at Michigan. I didn’t take birds from the campus population because I wanted those for my field study. Once the breeding season started in March, my days were frantic. I would typically ride a bus to campus before first light, set up a mate choice trial that ran for 3 hours, then grab binoculars and head for fieldwork (out the front doors of the museum). About two days per week, I would trap and color band the local population of finches. In the second year of the field study, I used hair dyes to change the coloration of the males that I caught. That color-change experiment was the basis for my 1991 Nature paper. On other days, I would walk around campus with my binoculars recording the behavior of banded birds with a special focus on pairing. After about two and a half hours of field work, I’d run back into the museum, literally run up 5 flights of stairs to the roof, set up birds for the second mate choice trial of the morning, and then go back out for more field work. That field season kept me in great physical shape. When birds started nesting, I was often grabbing a ladder (a really big and heavy ladder) to go out and climb to nests to check contents or band chicks. This routine didn’t stop until the end of July when the finches had finished nesting.”

“I stayed in camps that had only ceilings, no walls and floors. We used a clay filter to filter drinking and cooking water. It lit up at night with lamps and lanterns. We slept in a hammock, bathed in “igarapé” (which in Tupi Guarani means “canoe path”) with its very cold waters, and did the physiological needs in the bush. Perishable food was stored in large izopor boxes with ice for a maximum of 3 days. A BDFFP [Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project] car came to fill the pantry according to our schedule. In some cases, there was no road to the camp, so we had to use a handcart to take supplies. There was no communication radio and I used anti-ophidic serum. I was never alone. At all times during my Master’s, there was a person (called “mateiro”) who accompanied me to help in the field work – Antonio Cardoso, my faithful squire. He became a great friend too. He was always very dedicated, hardworking and very kind to me. I am very grateful for him. I stayed in the countryside for up to three weeks, without going to Manaus, where I lived. The work was very heavy because from the camp to the areas it was three kilometers walking. The path was not flat and all the time we were going up and down, crossing the “streams” and sometimes our feet were wet all day. We also had to go through areas full of “Embaúbas” (Cecropia), plants with suspended roots, which we stepped on for a long time and our feet were very painful afterwards. We returned, after a day of hard work, loaded with many bags full of branches from the litter that would later be opened in search of ant colonies. Sometimes, I arrived so tired at the camp that I didn’t have the strength to eat. I took my shower and lay in my hammock. Seu Antonio Cardoso, who prepared our meal, sometimes said “Baiana (person born in Bahia; that was my nickname in Manaus), come and eat, empty bag is not standing!” One of the incidents I remember was the day the BDFFP car got stuck in the mud of the road and was unable to climb a slope. The driver picked me up and Cardoso on foot! I rode a mule until I got to the car, but she didn’t want to walk and she stopped all the time! It was very funny! Another time, there was a poisonous snake sleeping very close to me and Mr. Cardoso saw it. If my memory serves me correctly, it was the surucucu-pico-de-jaca (Lachesis muta). In order not to frighten the snake, he started telling me to walk up to him, in front of him, slowly, slowly. There were not that many incidents but I could spend days telling you about the happy moments.”

“I think I was in the field over 60% of the 5 years I was in graduate school. The outer coast sites were rainy and difficult to get to, but very rewarding and fascinating for their high diversity and all of the fascinating interactions. The tides were often in the middle of the night, and I spent the day fishing for Salmon from Bob Paine’s tiny boat. I slept and ate in my small 4-wheel drive vehicle. The San Juan Island sites were much dryer and more difficult to work because the rock was so hard. I struggled to maintain the cages. But there I had the luxury of a house to stay in and I was better able to work up data and get caught up. I spent my free time solo diving, looking at sea star foraging biology. At the time, I think I was stressed trying to keep up with all the driving and fieldwork and keeping up with the data, but in hindsight those were absolutely the best times of my life. Bob Paine was a wonderful warm friend as well as a mentor and he kept reminding me how lucky I was, and he sure was right.”

“I tried to discourage the lab techs from giving them [individual birds] names. They all had numbers on their leg bands. And that was the whole point, that all the people running the experiment needed to do was to start the computer, enter in the bird band number, check to make sure that was in fact the correct bird in the box and press the start button. Everything else the computer handled. But I know the people who fed and cared for the birds gave them names. People always name lab animals.”