“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 would live in Mexico for much of the summer. One summer I rented a very small cabin in Cholla Bay with Pete Raimondi. There was no running water or power. It was very hot during the day (>42 degrees C), and very humid. We would often sleep on the roof of our cabin to catch the breeze. The mosquitoes could be ferocious, so we eventually got some mosquito nets. So, a lot of what we did was just try to survive. The locals in the town would say that there are about four days each summer that no human can survive. I was there for those days. As far as research, I would work the low tide in the morning and evening. At the beginning of the Spring tides, I would be on the reef by 4:30 or 5 AM, and work until the tide came in at about 10 AM. I would sleep in the afternoon, and then work the low tide again in the evening. The evenings were beautiful. I would make a point to watch the sunset every night. During the semester, I would drive from Tucson to Puerto Penasco on Thursday night, and work through the weekend. Much of the time, I slept in and worked out of my truck at Pelican Point. But there was also a house near Puerto Penasco, which we could stay at, and sometimes I would stay there. The house had power, and it was often full of interesting people, mostly marine biologists. There were many parties.”

“If you want real change why don’t I take you back to ‘75 when I was working in Panama? Okay, so we had miracle inventions but we didn’t have Ziploc bags then. We didn’t have cable ties. We didn’t have Vexar. We had to work with hardware cloth and chicken wire that tear up your hands underwater. There were so many things we didn’t have, but we did have write-in-the-rain notebooks and we had these wonderful Casio watches which I still use. You probably use these too for your behavioural work. They cost $13 and they’ve got a stop watch, a timer. All these wonderful things. I remember those things just come out. And then the mosquito repellent would eat them, so I learnt not to use mosquito repellent. Just all these little technologies. Now leaping forward to 1990, which skips work in the 80s. I worked with a good friend of mine who’s actually a bat biologist and he suggested, I think, that I use Vexar. Vexar is so much easier than when I did my first enclosures in Panama with my 72-year old father. We used hardware cloth and filled steel poles that we had scavenged from the Panama Canal dredging division. I didn’t have any money as a graduate student. The material was very heavy, and we carried them three km up a Panamanian river and put in enclosures there. You cut yourself to ribbons on hardware cloth. Whenever I have hurt myself in streams it has generally been from a piece of rebar or a piece of hardware cloth - which I’ve installed. Vexar was meant to keep chickens from cutting their feet and it was wonderful. And then Bill Rainey suggested that we use these things called hog rings. It’s a ring that you clamp shut, so it pinches through the nostrils of a pig and then you can lead the animal (cruel, actually). We repurposed them, and they were very great for closing and sealing things on the Vexar. And then my father, who grew up on a dirt floor homestead with gravity-fed water in Idaho, taught me something that has never been surpassed in technology for stream enclosures or other enclosures, which is– if nothing else works, cut up an inner tube. There are places where you can’t tie PVC pipe and screens together under water, at some impossible angle, but you can always tightly wrap bicycle inner tube around it. I think all of us who work in the field enjoy improvising technologies that go from the stone age, through 19th century hardware stores, to, these days, electronic technologies (but we older ecologists are terrified by electronics). The other stuff that is so much fun is the arts and crafts aspect of doing field manipulations. It seems you always have to invent new stuff, you always have to go into some local hardware store saying, ‘what can I do with these dog dishes?’ (a question Paul Dayton made famous). There’s a lot of that and a lot of it hasn’t changed. That’s the other thing I really like about the experience of working so long at the Eel, but really about any kind of field ecology where you collaborate with people who love it as well -you’re always trading these fun technologies, and many of them take you back to the nineteenth century, and then you realize life wasn’t as tough then as one might think, because those guys had really ingenious manually operated tools or water power tools that really worked. We just don’t know how to do it now, but they had many ways that were so ingenious, and it made doing things back then easier than you might expect.”

“In catching the birds and during the experimental manipulations, a field assistant, first Uno Unger, then Kuria Mwaniki, helped me. He held the male in a suitable position, while I cut and glued the tail feathers. This way there was no need for anesthetics, and the bird could be released immediately after being manipulated and ringed.”

“In order to get to the island, and to get food to the island, in particular, and get equipment to the island, we relied on the army. The reason for that is St. Kilda was an army base. They have a big radar installation on the island. And, actually, the reason it was possible for us to do all of this work on the island was, to a large part, because we did have frequent help from the military, in terms of getting ourselves to the island, getting equipment to the island, getting food to the island, but also, it was the Army’s generator that provided electricity and the shower block that allowed us to wash and what have you.”

“In the extreme south of the Florida Keys, including one place where I worked and lived called Big Pine Key, there is a small population of crocodiles, which are much more dangerous than alligators. I encountered them twice when swimming in canals at the end of the day. But they don’t go to the mangrove islands. But sharks are constantly around there. To sample some of these islands, I had to anchor some distance away and wade to the island. I had to always keep an eye out for sharks, and sometimes hit them on the top of the head with an oar that I carried with me. Mosquitoes were sort of a constant issue, in the summer and late spring and early fall. But you know, they were only mosquitoes, so I learnt to live with them.”

“In the non-breeding season, between February and March, we would map territories. We would walk through the forest, typically between six and eight o’clock, listening for sounds and interactions between birds. We would then note down where we saw birds, based on which we made territory maps. Typically, that would end by about noon, when the birds become much more silent and difficult to observe. In the breeding season, between April and July, we would work the whole day. I don’t remember exactly what time we started there. In our current field sites, we start preparing for fieldwork at 6.30, leave at seven, and then get back by two. Each of us had different tasks in the field. For example, one of us would monitoring the nest boxes. Once or twice a week, we monitored every box. After some events, like the first egg being laid, the whole program was enrolled. We would work out when the female started incubating the eggs to predict when the eggs would hatch. When the eggs hatch we would take a blood sample of the nestlings, and figure out when we had to come back to the nest to ring the nestlings at a particular age. Breeding seasons are very, very tough; there’s a lot of hard work involved. At that time, I was doing the field work, mainly, with Piet de Goede, who was one of the technicians, but also helped by other people like Piet Drent, Christiaan Both and many students. It’s the type of work that’s impossible to do without many hands. In autumn and winter, we would do a lot of “mist netting”. We would set up the nets early in the day, with little feeders of sunflower seeds to attract the birds, and drive between the different feeders monitoring the animals caught, typically between eight and noon. We would do that a couple of days per week, targeting different sites in the area, to avoid that habituation by the birds to the capture. And then, the birds would have to be transported back to the lab, which involved a 20-30 minute ride. The following morning, we would do the exploration test assays and release the animals back in the wild. So, the autumn and winter season was also used very heavily for doing field work.”

“in those days it was almost prohibited for a graduate student – a PhD graduate student – to have assistance. We were expected to do everything ourselves. And I certainly was operating that way. But one day, after being in the field in Veracruz for, I don’t know, several months, I was standing in a pasture and a herd of goats went by me, and behind the herd of goats was a young man about 16 years old, 16 or 17 years old, taking care of the goats. He walked up to me, and the first thing I noticed was he was wearing a necklace he had put together of plastic rings, my plastic rings which I had used to mark individual trees! In other words, knowing nothing about me or what I was doing, he had come along found these plastic rings and had just collected them for fun and made a necklace for himself. So I tried to explain to him what I was doing, describing the ants and the Beltian bodies and the nectaries on the leaves and all those kinds of things. He stood there and listened to me and then walked off with his goats. About two hours later he comes back with his herd of goats and this time he has a branch of the Acacia in his hands and he asks me a whole lot of very intelligent questions about the ants and the branch. Now this was a Mexican farm kid who probably had never been through more than 3rd or 4th grade. I don’t know whether Cayo could even write. At that time, in those days, we didn’t even think about asking things like that. So, I looked at that and said ‘Wow, this guy is smart, I wonder if he could help me with my experiments.’ I asked him where he lived and he pointed to a sticks-and-thatch house upon the top of a hill. We went up there, I made arrangements to talk to his father on Sunday, and I came back and we had a long discussion. His father thought I was negotiating how much money he was going to have to pay me to take on his son as an apprentice, while I was trying to figure out how much I was going to have to pay him to hire his son to work for me. We ended up with a giant figure of 7 dollars a week. Cayo worked as my assistant the rest of the time in my thesis research.”

“It was a deep hunter-gatherer thrill to get up early in the morning, drive and hike to some of the relatively wild natural habitats on the fringes of the southern Bay Area, and explore them looking for butterflies. Bracing myself to ask landowners permission to work on their land was also a memorably scary but usually positive experience. We marked butterflies with Sharpie pen stripes on their wings.”

“It was a long experiment and it was intense every day. We met weekly, and we would write out all the duties we had to do in a very regular fashion on the wall. We were collecting soil, arthropod and vegetation data, and monitoring all those environmental parameters. We really couldn’t go away anytime, because the machine was running all the time. Back then, I had never done growth chamber research. I was a field ecologist, so, to me, the idea that we would have this experiment upstairs, right there, running all the time, was strange. There was lot of maintenance too – the earthworms would all crawl out, so we had one person whose job, every morning, was to put all the earthworms back in. Or, the snails would leave the chamber, or get under the railings, and you had to find them all and put them back. Things like that. It was a lot of maintenance. But this was England, where people don’t work on the weekends and have a tea break in the morning and in the afternoon, no matter what. When I complained to John Lawton that the libraries weren’t open during the weekend – we didn’t have the internet back then – he said nobody stays here late at night, or comes in on weekends, except the crazy Americans! I was one of those crazy Americans.”

“It was a major logistical operation to do something like this. We had to be prepared with all the camping supplies, food supplies, field supplies, and scientific supplies that we needed. We had to make decisions beforehand on which sites to go to next, based on our guesses on when plants would be flowering at each site this year. We drove in multiple vehicles, with different subgroups sometimes going to different sites and then all of meeting up at a campsite in the evening. Sometimes we would get to a site, and immediately realize that we could not sample the site then, because the plants were not yet at the right stage for collection of floral capsules. We always had to have a contingency plan in place on where to go next if the site we initially planned to visit was not ready for collections. These sites were regions where we could call up someone and simply ask about the flowering state of plants. Once we were done working at a site all day, we would either return to last night’s campsite or find a new one. Everybody had a different job in setting up the camp – it was a semi-military-like operation. Some people would be responsible for setting up the tents, others setting up the kitchen and preparing dinner for that evening, and others for getting the samples ready for processing after dinner. We would do this day after day after day, and then eventually take everything back to the lab back in Pullman. There we would sort and store the samples, spend a day or two getting things done at home and organizing supplies, and then go back again into the field for another set of days. We did this week after week after week during field season, sometimes eventually losing track of what day of the week it is.”

“It was hard work! But at the same time, it was exciting and interesting. We had this interesting experimental technique; no one had done anything like this before. I was learning a huge amount that no one had known before. I was watching the colonisation of these islands, and almost every day found something new and interesting. It was grueling, very grueling, sometimes physically unpleasant. Especially the sharks and mosquitoes! But it was so exciting and important, and I was glad to do it.”

“Jan is my wife. We’d often spend long evenings painting model eggs together. In the paper we also acknowledge Bruce Campbell, who was one of the best nest recorders in the country. He came across one of our experimental nests and reported our model egg as a real cuckoo egg! So, unwittingly he convinced us that our model eggs were realistic.”

“Jennifer Nielsen had been a fisheries field technician for US Forest Service, then came to graduate school at Berkeley. She was a fish-whisperer, and an expert in electro-fishing. I knew nothing about electro-fishing, so she advised me on which ones to buy and then she taught me how to do this so we don’t harm the fish. You have to be very light in your touch. Jennifer Nielsen – we called her ‘the goddess of shock’.”

“Living on BCI [Barro Colorado Island] was a bit like summer camp, wooden dormitories with screened windows, shared bathrooms and no privacy. Most of us stayed on the island for months to years at a time, with occasional trips to town to get personal supplies. There were only about 10 people, so we got to know each other very well – like it or not. My first year on the island was one of the most wonderful, and the second year one of the worst. There were no phones and the personal computer hadn’t been invented, so it was quite isolating. I would get up every morning, head out in the woods by myself until the parrots started calling and heading to their roosting sites (about an hour before dark), which would be my alarm to start heading back too. I had thousands of plants marked in light gaps, hot, messy, ant-y places to work. I would spend all day measuring leaves with a plastic grid to quantify herbivory. Excruciatingly boring – but there were always the myriad of interactions of the rainforest that more than compensated. Once I fell in a hole and it took me hours to climb out – no one would ever have found me. Dinners were communal, overcooked and rather boring. At night I would fill in data sheets, which, back in Chicago, I would type onto cards that could be read by a mainframe computer. Then up again with the dawn chorus of howler monkeys.”

“Mike and I partitioned the Fen into two halves. He had one territory, and I had another territory. When you map out a field site, you almost feel you’ve taken possession of your patch. And you become quite protective of your nests. I remember one of the wardens once telling me that an old man had been reported looking for nests along my stretches. I had a sleepless night thinking somebody might be collecting eggs on my study site. Then I woke up the next morning and realized that the old man, obviously, was me! Our daily routine was to look for new nests and to check the nests we’d already found to monitor their progress. It was the thrill of the hunt as much as anything and tremendous fun to see what happened to the model eggs in our experiments.”

“Of course, it’s much easier again to do this on barn swallows than on widowbirds. Malte Andersson did this in the field in Kenya where he was always surrounded by perhaps 200 locals, 75 to 100 of whom were screaming children. It was not an easy task. He doesn’t mention this in his paper, but he told me subsequently. I had a much easier deal. I rarely had more than one person attending these events.”

“One challenge to working with primates is that you only have a limited amount of time that you can work with them each day. They need to eat, rest, and socialize, there are husbandry needs, and there are usually several people working with them who are sharing time. In a typical morning, we’d come in and feed them first. The monkeys lived in a large social group in large indoor-outdoor enclosures [...], so we’d call them inside and offer whoever we were working with the opportunity to come into the testing chamber, which is attached to the indoor area in their home enclosure. They only participate if they choose to, so if they came in, we’d run the study and then let them back outside to join the rest of their group.”

“One of the things I remember with great pleasure is watching the reed warblers reject the eggs. You can make a little channel through the reeds from the bank and just sit quietly, and the reed warblers will come and sit on the nest. We saw both males and females pecking at the model eggs. So, it’s very clear that both sexes rejected eggs. At one nest the male was quite happy with the odd egg in the nest, but the female decided she didn’t like it. She started to dismantle the nest to build a new nest nearby, while the male continued to incubate. You could imagine him thinking, what on earth is she doing? And of course, once the nest was dismantled, he had to agree to the move! I just remember that as a bit of natural history that I found absolutely fascinating, that males and females both reject, but they wouldn’t always agree on whether rejection should take place or not.”

“Our “day” began in the evening. We opened the live traps and baited them. We ran the trap lines very early the next morning (to prevent the sun from having the chance to kill any captured animals). Traps that had not caught a rodent were closed for the day. We took the captures back to the canyon where we identified, measured, weighed and sexed them. In the evening we returned each animal back to the trap location where it had been caught. And it was evening and it was morning of one day.”