“Back at Stony Brook, I would go over to the medical school library, which was not on the main campus, and look up in the giant books of the Science Citation Index, which was printed in a multi-volume set on very, very thin, like, almost transparent paper, because it was all printed out—“online” did not exist. And I would look up every couple of months to see – did anyone cite this paper?”

“Back in the early 70s, there was less of a division between Ecology and Evolution, and most theoreticians worked in both fields.”

“Back in those days, there was no Twitter or other things like that, so I don’t think one was particularly aware of how a paper was received, until after people began to cite it. I remember being on holiday in Wales actually, when it came out, and finding a copy of Nature at a news agent.”

“Basically, what you’re supposed to do is not only frame and pursue an original scientific study, but you’re supposed to get what are construed as positive results. And I was getting nothing but negatives. I remember my worst moment was, actually, with my wife, we were in Michigan, the state of Michigan, collecting fossils, Our clothes were dirty, so we went to a laundromat, washed our clothes, and I pulled a specimen out of my pocket – which was a particularly nice one and very hard, so I was just carrying it around – and I just couldn’t tell it from the ones in New York. And, you know, it turns out it wasn’t even the same species – you have to look at the eyes, so forth. But these things all basically look alike. You know, so here I am halfway across the United States, or a third of the way across the United States, in a different segment of time, but it’s just the same as what I was familiar with back in New York. And my heart sank, it really did. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get a PhD because I wasn’t seeing any evolution.”

“Bill [Clark] graciously gave me a job for a year at Harvard so I could figure out my new plans. Since I was already at Harvard and my husband was now at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], it was easier to stay at Harvard than go anywhere else.”

“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.”

“Both findings still hold, by and large. There has been a subsequent discussion and even controversy as to how this low specificity compares to temperate zone patterns (i.e. what is the latitudinal trend in specificity), based on our and other people’s subsequent work, but the patterns on specificity uncovered here remain accepted. Likewise, further analyses of global insect diversity, including our own work, came close to our estimate.”

“But remember, this paper does not represent original research on my part. It’s a meta-analysis of a lot of work done by a lot of people. But it’s a good example of how a lot of obscure papers – the University of Texas publications, and, if you look at the literature cited, a lot of those papers aren’t in big journals – how a lot of useful data can be lying around in small, underappreciated journals, and you can put it together in a large meta-analysis to provide some useful information”

“But then when I was down there tromping around looking at all these species in their respective habitats, I was so struck by how many oaks there were. When I came back from that initial inquiry trip, just trying to scope out field sites, it struck me that it really might be more interesting to focus on the oak clade and look at the evolutionary history of how different lifespans evolved within that.”

“By letters! Remember, this is 1986-87, so a lot of stuff was done the old-fashioned way by exchanging letters.”

“Coevolution today is just a normal thing. As soon as you start talking about it in animals and plants out there you realise there are many many examples where one species has evolutionarily reacted to another and then the other one has evolutionarily reacted to the first one and you go back and forth and back and forth and you find yourself with coevolution. That’s just the view today, a standard way of looking at the world. In 1962-63, that was a very novel way of looking at the world.”

“Corree Flats occurred to me [as a possible study site] because I knew of Ross Pengilley’s ecological research there, on skinks.”

“Cuckoos parasitize several hosts across the UK. In moorlands, up in Scotland and in the West Country, there is a genetic race that parasitizes meadow pipits. The genetic race of cuckoo we have here in the Fens lays a green egg, and they go for reed warblers. Actually, of all the hosts that cuckoos go for, reed warblers are the easiest to study, simply because their nests are easy to find.”

“Dennis Slice was our IT person. He had gotten a PhD in Evolutionary Biology, working with Jim Rohlf in my department and then was working as the IT person, running the computer systems and giving a lot of computational and statistical advice in the department at that time (he eventually went on to become a noted researcher and Professor in South Carolina and then at Florida State University). So one of the really challenging questions which Laura Morrow came up with a solution for was: we realized that a lot of the data was not published in tables; It was published in figures. And so we thought, how can we get this data? It’s in figures, what are we going to do? And she said, she had been taking a course with Professor Jim Rohlf, and he had mentioned that people could digitize figures and extract the data. And she said, we could do that with this paper, and then Dennis Slice helped us to actually figure out how to do that. And then Joe Walsh did a lot of that because he had amazingly steady hand-eye coordination. He did a lot of digitizing. So this was very much a collaborative effort.”

“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.”

“Dick Hutto provided survey data of crossbills in the Rocky Mountains, which allowed us to compare our data from the South Hills to the Rocky Mountains. Chris Smith had the heritability data for lodgepole pine cones that was unpublished, and it remains unpublished. Chris had conducted classic work on co-evolution between squirrels and lodgepole pine.”

“DRB Stockwell was very, very helpful in those early years in getting GARP [Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction] running. In fact, he mounted it on a web application specifically for us, which really made the tool usable.”

“During a visit to East Africa in 1975, I saw long-tailed and Jackson’s widowbirds on their savanna breeding grounds in the Kenyan highlands. Why were male long-tailed widowbirds, with their black plumage, red wing epaulet and, especially, a half meter long unwieldy tail, so different from the females [...]?”

“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.”