“I’m actually trying to figure out a schedule to go down there for a month, with some help, and do a 50-year census. I think it will be interesting and historical. I’m in good physical shape, so I’m going to try to do it, somehow.”

“I’m pretty sure hand-drawn. Yeah, I did hand-draw [the graphs]. I hand-lettered too, with a Leroy lettering set.”

“If I said that, it represents another terrible omission. Most of the focus of the paper and my career is on the various evolutionary roles of biological interactions: competition for potentially limited resources, predation, disturbance, and facilitative interactions. Certainly those three factors are critically important, but I would also add biological interactions!”

“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.”

“If you were to do it again now, you could probably parameterize the whole model in one go, rather than doing piecemeal statistical analyses for each function that goes into the model. So, I suspect that if you did it now, given the advances in statistical methods, you would probably use a different statistical approach. My hunch, though, is it would probably give you very similar insight there.”

“In 1964, my advisor said to me, ‘What kind of job are you planning to go to?’ And I turned around and said, ‘Why, I have no idea’. We didn’t even think about it. I just assumed I would be a professor somewhere. Then he said to me, ‘Well, there are two jobs opening up that I know of, one in Cornell and one at the University of Kansas. Would you like to interview?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess so’. Two of us – one, a big fellow named Dick Root, who is now deceased, and I went and interviewed for the two of them. We met each other on the street at Berkeley afterwards. And Root said to me, ‘Well, which one do you like?’ And I said, ‘Well, I like KU – University of Kansas – because it is a little more academic’, and Root said, ‘Well I like Cornell because it is a little more agricultural’. And so I said, ‘OK, Dick you take the one at Cornell, I will take the one in Kansas.’ That was it. That was competition. There was not even a job advertisement in Science or anywhere. In those circumstances, you didn’t think about – Will this paper get me a job? Will this paper make me famous? Will this paper be job security over the next 20 years? I wrote the paper because I was curious and I liked explaining it to other people.”

“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 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.”

“In his signed review, he [Jared Diamond] said the paper was better than he expected it to be from its pedestrian-sounding title, which was originally “Metapopulation dynamics of the bay checkerspot butterfly.” We adopted the alternative title he suggested.”

“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 retrospect, I think I, too, jumped on this interpretation too quickly.”

“In terms of the main conclusions, yes, I think so. The question is, what else is involved, because clearly something else is involved. We ran several other experiments looking at alternative factors that might affect the evolution of discrete morphs. [...] And the answer was that behavioral factors did not work either. There’s clearly something that has to happen at the genetic level that predisposes moths to form discrete morphs. We were not able to access it. So, we did not have the final answer. And that’s not exactly unusual in science. I don’t feel disappointed with the work at all.”

“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 last few months of my PhD, I developed repetitive strain injury in the backs of both my hands from basically typing in a cold, poorly heated, drafty British house. It really slowed me down. I would handwrite some of my thesis chapters, and I’d mail it off to some friends, and they’d sit there and type it up for me and email it back. Getting through the last little bit of it was challenging. Part of the manuscript of this paper was written like that, through the generosity of friends helping me out.”

“in the late 1990s, there was no “track changes” feature in MS Word, but there was text highlighting. We would each use two highlight colours – one highlight colour was for your new text and one highlight colour was for your comments on the existing text. When you received a copy from the other author, you went through, and for the new text, if you liked what they wrote, you “decolorized” it, as we used to say. I remember manuscript drafts would get huge in size with the four rainbow colours of highlighting, but gradually it would shrink down as we finalized the wording.”

“In the next step we had to prevent them [stickleback fish] from seeing existing differences in red intensity. If it had not been fish, using the same artificial red color on both males would be a good choice. However, older studies from the 40s had tried nail varnish and their sticklebacks went astray. I got the idea to use filtered light instead when I saw the ballet “The Firebird” in the Berne opera house. The dancers changed color again and again. When the main lights were on, one could see that they all had white clothes which appeared red or blue when the color of the light was changed. I tried green lamps and suddenly all red disappeared from the sticklebacks and the different reds looked brownish.”

“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 in the UK, I think this was normal; it was unusual for the supervisor to put his/her name on the papers written by students. For example, H van Balen, a contemporary of mine and a student of [HN] Kluijver’s, was the sole author on his main works. I continued this, only adding my name to a student’s work if a) I had taken a major part in the analysis or b) obtained the grant which funded the work. The putting of supervisor’s name on students papers I think spread from the US. Pressure to publish and shortage of funds has more or less forced supervisors to publish with their students. Another, though different, reason for multi-authored papers is that often teams of people with different skills combine on a project.”

“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.”

“In those days none of the good ecologists put their names on their students’ papers. I don’t think [Robert] Paine ever put his name on a student’s paper, nor do I remember Joe Connell doing so, nor [Gunnar] Thorson nor [Roger] Kitching or any good ecologists of the era. I did not do so either. Joint authorships were done when you genuinely worked together on a project, and I put Paine on some of my early Antarctic papers as he contributed a lot. So the real question is why it is so common now, and the obvious answer is that our “fame” seems to depend on number of papers and citations rather than the creative breakthroughs or important advances to a field. I like to think that the colleagues I care about are able to evaluate my “worth” based on, both, publications and independent students not dragging my name around as a “Matthew Effect"! The problem is that our bureaucrats are too lazy to do their jobs well, and want to be dazzled by metrics such as numbers of papers irrespective of whether the papers say anything worth while or those stupid H values that reflect nothing of much importance that I can see. And nobody any more keeps track of successful students we mentor, and here is where I want to stake my legacy.”