“Nirmal Kumar lived with his family right in the center of the home range of one of the troops of langur monkeys that I was studying. He was a dedicated and knowledgeable bird watcher who took great interest both in the monkeys themselves (some of whom he knew as individuals) and in my observations about them. Later, I also met Mona Ali, the wife of Aftab, a professor at the local police academy whose home fell within the home range of another of the groups. [...] Almost as important as their generous friendship to a stranger in a strange country, was their communications about unusual events in the lives of the monkeys I was studying that they happened to witness in their front yards.”

“North Carolina had an art studio for people who were doing science. And I think we brought them a hand version of that graphic and they made it look nicer.”

“Nowadays I suppose I would write this as two papers, because people do that, but I tend to write longer papers.”

“Nowadays, there are more tools available to study behaviour, such as fancy telemetry systems and RFID transponder systems that allow you to “see” behaviour that previously remained hidden or was not tractable on such scale, but other than that, little has changed. And of course from the molecular side, the tools also improved dramatically with the use of microsatellite markers or single-nucleotide polymorphisms, which allow you to assign paternity and measure individual genetic diversity (heterozygosity) with much higher precision.”

“Nowadays, there’s more politics involved. Then I was on my own, so I didn’t need to discuss things. Whenever I had an idea (sometimes a good one), I was able to do it straight away in the morning when I woke up. But now if I have an idea, I have to make sure that everybody’s happy, or that we get permission. We now collaborate intensively with Nature Seychelles. At that time, you didn’t have any ethics approval ; you just do the things you want to do. But now it has to go through approval. This is, of course, important, because they are endangered birds, and before you do any things, you must make sure you don’t harm the bird, and also that all are happy what you do.”

“Nowadays, we actually look at the reflectance and try to match colors to the actual butterflies, but in those days we just took a photo and tried and made it look about right to the human vision. We didn’t have the methods to kind of use bird vision models to match the models.”

“Of course, I did my thesis in the ancient days — before DNA-based information was available for any organisms except a few lab models. As a result, it was very difficult to study endosymbionts, which typically do not grow in lab culture. The only options were microscopy and antibiotics, which are very limited on their own. So I didn’t work on symbionts.”

“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.”

“Often it seems like my favourite papers never get published. The papers that I like the most, reviewers don’t like at all! I have a computer full of such manuscripts. There is a Finnish journal which I think is Journal of Negative Results. I have been wondering whether, perhaps, we should establish a Journal of Unpublished Results!”

“Oh, it’s certainly one of the papers I’m most proud of. [...] I think it had a real impact on the field of conservation science, and a strong indirect impact on the way a lot of forests in the United States are managed. And I’m proud of both those things.”

“Once in a while, I go back and dig something out to remind myself what I did. Surely, it would never even be reviewed now because of its length. This is probably a good thing because it would be more readable, yet I have always enjoyed my “story telling” approach to ecology, that involves an understanding of the big picture in time and space. Even as a student I realized how important scaling time and space were, and that would be lost if the paper were to be chopped up as demanded by today’s standards.”

“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 day as I was walking across an old field, a beetle flew over my head and landed on a small shrub in front of me. And an ant ran after the beetle, trying to grab it, and the beetle then flew away. That sort of stuck in my head, and later on the same day I walked back by the same plant and looked closely at it. There were ants all over the surface of the plant. I thought that that was kind of curious and I noticed that the ants were going in and out of big thorns on the branches. I took one of these trees home to dissect and see what was inside the thorns and so on. So, I was looking at the ants like ants, without thinking about anything more. Well, maybe a week later I cut down two trees in a pasture, to take one of them home to dissect again. The other one, by accident, I just left there, by the stump. So there were two stumps about a metre apart, one with a tree cut down next to it and the other with no tree. About six weeks later, I walked by that pair of stumps and noticed that the stump that had no tree lying next to it had produced some sprouts but they were in terrible condition. They had been eaten down to almost nothing. Whereas the stump that had the cut down tree crown next to it had a beautiful one metre tall sprout growing out from it with beautiful leaves and very good condition and ants all over this sprout. Well, that caused me to realise suddenly that what I was looking at was an interaction where the ants were protecting the tree. It wasn’t just an accident that there were ants there. They were very involved with the tree. So I picked that up to study for my dissertation. And my dissertation basically consisted of removing the ants from thousands of these trees.”

“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.”

“One of those names, Stuart Pimm, was one of the formal reviewers. He had a very important input as he made us realize that the expected hypothesis against which to compare our results was not a random network, but a compartmentalized one arising from tight, parallel specialization. This is reflected by a key phrase added to the abstract in the last minute.”

“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 “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.”

“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!”

“Our study area was a remote place about one hour drive by gravel roads from the nearest civilized place with food stores, telephone, and so on. We were housed there at a decaying, century old house that had previously been the abode of forest wardens, which played the role of modest field station in the middle of nowhere. No telephone, no heating system, no warm water, roof leaks, terribly uncomfortable beds, but the evening meetings in front of the fire place were an unbeatable pleasure that compensated for these and other inconveniences.”

“Overabundance of fleshy fruits in autumn-winter, and of overwintering birds that feed on them, are two obvious features of evergreen Mediterranean-type scrublands and forests in southern Spain. It was obvious to local observers, yet remained unreported in the ornithological or ecological literature.”