“I happened to be talking with Dan Boone, who was the manager of the Aleutian Islands Unit of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. He approached me and said the military – both the Navy and the US Air Force – were interested in having work done on sea otters at their respective military bases. Adak was a naval base and Shemya Island, where we worked some years later, was an Air Force base. There was a military programme, called the Legacy Programme, which was for doing wildlife and ecological research on US military bases. Some of that Legacy money had gone to those particular sites and the Aleutians Refuge was asked to advise the military on what to do. That’s how I got involved with it.”

“I lost almost 50% of my plots to accidents of one kind or another – the owner of the field site changed their mind, there was a storm, there was too much rain, the city decided to put a water pipeline through the middle of my plot! I mean all kinds of things; I lost a lot. If I was advising a student today about doing this kind of fieldwork research I would advise them to set up a lot of plots and anticipate that a big number of them – 50% of them – are going to be destroyed over the next two years.”

“I picked that plot in Gothic because it was close to my lab, and had a good mixture of the two species of wildflowers I wanted to use, as well as a good population of bees.”

“I picked the site after going to many, many different places. San Felasco is just a fantastic Preserve. It was one of the biggest in the region and it’s also easy to get to. It has old growth forest in it and a whole range of different habitats. That preserve, alone, has 14 or 15 of the total oak species in it and was the obvious place to get most of the species. It has so much heterogeneity in habitat and all three of the main community types there. That was the best place to get most of the species in close proximity. Because I had to access most of the tree canopies with an aerial lift, having them all in one location made fieldwork simpler.”

“I spent the first part of my time here studying dunnock mating systems in the Botanic Garden. Our children were very young then and I wanted to have a local study, so I could spend time with them. And then gradually, as they started to grow up a bit and go to school, I felt free to go further distance – not very far, only 20 miles away. I also wanted a change of scene. I knew Wicken Fen very well and thought this would be a good place.”

“I started my Ph.D. work on hummingbirds, and spent most of my first summer as a graduate student studying time and energy budgets of territorial male Broad-tailed Hummingbirds. During that time I discovered that 1) bumble bees don’t get up at 5 AM, like hummingbirds, and 2) they don’t fly in rainy weather, as hummingbirds do. Also, you don’t need permits to work with them (federal and state permits are required to capture hummingbirds), for example for marking them (with paint) or gluing tags on them. So at the end of my first summer of research I decided to switch to work on bumble bees for the next three summers.”

“I worked in Tanzania and Uganda during my thesis on Colobus monkeys. And, while they were very interesting, the problem was that they live in the canopy, between 70 and 120 feet above your head. Your capacity to recognize individuals is quite limited. Your capacity to collect biological material from them is quite limited. Your capacity to measure food availability is quite limited. And having spent three years working on this, for my next project, I wanted both to be placed in the UK rather than overseas, and I wanted a more tractable species where one could actually get access to the animals, where one could ideally collect biological material for individuals, where you could measure the food supply, and where you could follow the survival of individuals throughout their life. And that immediately made me realize that really one wanted a terrestrial species, and you wanted a terrestrial species that was visible and lived in a habitat where you could actually see what was going on. And red deer in Scotland live in open environments. I’d had experienced them previously when I worked for Roger Short taking a film of his work on the reproductive physiology of red deer. So, I knew about it. And red deer are one of the principal grazing species throughout much of the highlands of Scotland, so there’s an economic interest in them. And all of those made me realize the red deer were a good animal to work on.”

“I, actually, got the results in 1988. But the inconvenient event at the time was that I was getting a divorce, so I wasn’t able to work on it as quickly as I would have otherwise.”

“In choosing the House Finch as my study organism and the University of Michigan campus as my field site, I consciously traded the joys of working in a wild setting for the practicality of a tractable system in which I could conduct experiments.”

“Initially, I planned to find a field site in Uganda, but Brit colleagues warned me about Idi Amin and the turmoil there. So I reoriented to Kenya.”

“It is very common, and relatively easily to catch and keep in the lab. [] it was just a convenient species”

“It was mostly because of logistics. It’s flat, unlike some of these other sites, which are straight up the sides of mountains or deep into canyons. It’s much more accessible than some of our other sites from where I was living at the time. It didn’t take many hours or half a day or more to get to the site. I didn’t have to camp out there for long periods of time. We also had more laboratory access from that site. But, I think the biggest advantage is it was quite clear that that site was very strongly mutualistic, and we could ask how the interactions between the plants and the moths evolve when there is strong mutualism. Finally, there were so many moths and so many plants, we could work on those populations without any concern at all about damaging the populations.”

“My decision to work with skinks rather than snakes (the animals I had studied previously) was a strategic one. I wanted an academic job, so I needed papers in good journals, within a three-year timeframe – and I reckoned that I could do that more easily with abundant small skinks rather than rare large venomous snakes!”

“Originally I was going to be doing my work on Santa Rosa Island, and I was partially funded by the National Park Service. But because of political situations on Santa Rosa Island the park superintendent sort of nixed that project.”

“Our original plan was to study Buxa tiger reserve [...]. I didn’t get permits to do fieldwork there, so I focused on Mahananda. Here’s the issue of serendipity again!”

“Partly because the jays that I got interested in for my dissertation were present across much of Mexico. And partly because I ended up falling in love with the country, and I made some very good friends in the country, who are my colleagues to this day, 30 years later, and ended up even marrying into a Mexican family. It’s kind of come to be a second home.”

“Piet Drent was working at the Westerheide and in Oosterhout. Since I was his PhD student, those areas became, naturally, [my] study area [...] too.”

“Plants are ideally suited to these high diversity Community Ecology questions because they don’t move and you can find them anytime you want!”

“Swallows are an interesting group because they’re cavity nesters, and so they tend to get a lot of parasites. But there’s “monomorphic bright”, “monomorphic dull” and “dimorphic bright” species just within swallows in North America. So you could look at purple martins, you could look at cliff swallows, and you could look at tree swallows. The problem is they all have the same breeding season, so you’d make yourself crazy trying to study them. I also spent a little bit of time trying to get ectoparasites off of swallows, based on this technique that I had heard about, where you stick the bird in a plastic bag that’s got an ether-soaked ball of cotton in the bottom and then wait for the parasites to fall off. And all that got me was a bird looking up at me like, “what are you doing?” It didn’t really pan out. Hamilton worked on insects, and I always liked insects and I thought okay, this is going to be better to do on insects.”

“The Angelo Reserve was a Nature Conservancy site when I first worked there. I was very happy in Panama where you get deep in the forest and only occasional hunters or GIs practicing for Vietnam will come by, but my experiments were left alone. When I worked in the Midwestern Ozarks, sometimes you had to ask permission of somebody who was staring down a rifle sight at your partner down in the river, but after you talked to those folks you can work, and the experiments weren’t sabotaged. But in California with so many “wreckreationalists” [...] that wasn’t the case, and I spent three years trying to set up small, simple unobtrusive manipulations. For example, I’d put little photosynthesis chambers in National Forest lands, but the guys in their all-terrain vehicles get as deep or deeper into the forest, so my little chambers were always smashed up. Bill Trush, when he was a forestry student at Berkeley, told me about this Nature Conservancy preserve around the upper South Fork Eel River. It was 3.5 hours north of Berkeley, and it had a fence across the one road that went into 8000 acres of forest that protected five kms of river.”