Born in the small mountain town of Salida, Colorado and raised in the midwest, I caught my first snake when I was six, cloned paramecia at 14, dropped out of high school while working with ecologists at a local college and published my first research while an undergrad...
Storyteller
First and foremost I am storyteller ...Some concern my research; others, discoveries by colleagues. My favorite stories come from remote parts of the earth and have seldom been told...
Some have required that I use my wits... scrambling up trees to escape elephants... discovering an Aztec burial chamber populated with tarantulas... tracking down a frog so lethal that a touch can kill... using blowguns to defend against drug lords... eating scorpions, rats, spiders, and beetle grubs with native peoples (my diet was the subject of a Gourmet magazine article by Regina Schrambling)...
... accidentally sitting on the deadliest snake of the Americas, a fer-de-lance.
(A cartoon of this last event, below, was published in the National Geographic.)
I am one of a lucky few to receive a PhD under poet of biology EO Wilson, one of the warmest, most equality-minded and principled scientists I have ever met. Ed kindly spoke about me on CSPAN. Back in 2009 I presented Ed with a sculpture of one of my photographs as his lifetime achievement award from the Explorers Club. Read my tribute to Ed here.