Details of my Background

Born in 1952 in the middle of nine children, son of a carpenter (dad) and an avid reader (mom) I first remember thinking of a career as a naturalist in Yosemite National Park on one of several undated trips my family took there, sometimes spending an entire week. We camped 13 weekends in a row one summer, after a near-tragedy at Zuma Beach when two uncles and some sons, including two of my brothers, we swept into the Pacific by the rip tide. Fortunately, the Coast Guard picked up those who didn't make it to shore on their own. Obviously, we liked camping and the beach.

That first birding trip, in October 1966, in Florida during a camping trip, mentioned in my last blog, sparked my interest in birds. I would see a few hundred species before attending college and majoring in Zoology and later Botany as detailed above. At the University of Arkansas (1970-1974), I met Dr. Douglas James, an avian ecologist, who drew my interests into a rather new statistical field, multivariate analysis. For many years, I've summarized his and his student's research by saying, "By measuring 17 habitat characteristics as variables, such as number of trees in 1/10 acre in different size classes, number of twigs per acre at breast height, percent ground and canopy cover, etc., you can determine that a Mockingbird sings from the top of a tree.

However, for reasons listed in my autobiography, "Windsong," my life would take me through 44 jobs, to date. I added a new one this year: using mostly English to teach art to children in China. Dad was a carpenter with nine, so my college life was something I had to figure out independently. Later, I'd get into sales, construction, teaching community college, courses, driving a bus, working in an intensive care unit in a hospital, as a janitor elsewhere, and so on. Eventually, I'd return to the U of A (1989-1991) for a master's in botany. This led to a nearly 17 year career in the US Forest Service, first as a field botanist/ecologist on the Sylamore Ranger District, Ozark National Forest, then in South Carolina at the Savannah River Site, eight years on the Kisatchie National Forest, and a few years as regional ecologist for the Southern Region.

My time in the US Forest Service allowed me to publish a chapter in a book on Carex sedges of the Kisatchie and a chapter in a book on managing mammals in the Southern Region which covers Texas and Oklahoma, east through Kentucky to Virginia and south to Puerto Rico. I've lived about 20 years in Arkansas, eight in Louisiana, seven in California, five in Kentucky, a few in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, and a grand total of 22 weeks scattered across China, mostly in the Shencai community near Shenyang and the small town of Jinjing north of Changsha.

My interest changed over the years, from birds through college, into making a living and raising children (two sons, three daughters, only two of which are "biological"), to collecting plants (Flora of Baxter County, Arkansas, published in 1993 in Casteanea), to writing a book on Carex sedges of Arkansas (available on request still draft but complete) from 1991 to 2011 (a target date set in the early 1990s), to learning Chinese to make friends with Chinese people and biologists.

Currently, I'm interested in Prenanthes (plant) and Odonates (dragon and damsel flies), along with a long term interest in Carex species in Arkansas and China and Echinacea paradoxa var. paradoxa. I'm also interested in any species in China and in Baxter County, Arkansas, where I live.

Posted on August 27, 2018 09:14 PM by sedgehead