Pam’s twice my age, and this is my second year as her research assistant, but still she’s always asking.
“Beastly out here today,” she says.
“Better than serving mystery meat at Dobbs.” Until I’d begun working for Pam, my work-study job had been food service in the cafeteria near my dorm.
I’d registered for Dr. Pam Harrison’s biology class two years earlier, during my first year at the University of Missouri. Even then I knew I wanted to focus on birds; my childhood obsession with them had never waned.
I’d hoped to go to Seattle for college, to the University of Washington, where I could get involved with the Magellanic penguin program I’d heard so much about. But I was too daunted by the size of the loans the UW program would require to consider it. Stupid, Pam would later tell me, when she heard how I ended up at Mizzou. How’re you going to get anywhere if you don’t take risks?
The housing lottery assigned me to Jones Hall my freshman year, and I soon learned that the all-women’s dorm is a coveted place to live for sorority girls thanks to its proximity to Greek Town. My roommate, Taylor, was a petite, lively blonde from Springfield whose main goal in college was getting into the Tri-Delts. Taylor invited me to all the parties, insisted on doing my makeup—since I usually wore none—and opened up her wardrobe to me. “It’s too short,” I’d say after squeezing into one of her tiny skirts. “That’s the point,” she’d reply and hand me a tube of lip gloss.
Thanks to Taylor and her makeovers, I felt as though I’d just met a new version of myself, along with scores of other new students, and, for those first months, I relished this glimpse of who I could be, having shed the tomboy of my childhood. Yet as the months passed, I found it hard to bond with this new me, as well as with the other students. I’d be in a crowded fraternity basement, beer flowing, music blasting, and feel a sudden need to push my way out, happier the moment I began walking home alone in the cold night air. I’d find myself wanting to sneak out of a guy’s bed so we wouldn’t have to try to make conversation as soon as we sobered up. The fun was fleeting, even though, week after week, I’d show up hoping it would be different.
In my second semester, I took my first class with Pam, and my focus shifted—sharply, as if snapped back into its natural place—from parties to science. A tiny, dark-haired woman in her mid-forties, Pam was energetic, blunt, no-nonsense, and her passion for ornithology was palpable and contagious. She could answer any question without hesitation, many answers based on her own research, and I wondered what it would be like to have that sort of knowledge, to know as much about a species or an environment as you did about yourself.
Pam taught several courses in biological sciences and ran the avian ecology lab. That semester, I read everything I could about birds and registered for her avian ecology course in the fall. One day, she took me aside after class. She said she needed a field research assistant, and while she usually hired graduate students, she sensed that I might be interested. The job entailed searching for and monitoring nests, resighting banded birds, and recording field notes.
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” I said.
“Are you in decent shape? There’s a lot of hiking involved.”
An active runner back then, I logged about fifty miles a week. I nodded.
“How’s your hearing?”
“Fine.”
“Are you color-blind?”
“No.”
“Any problem being out in bad weather?”
I shook my head.
“Poison ivy, bats, snakes—problem?”
“No.”
“Then you’re hired,” she said. “We leave from the Tucker Hall parking lot tomorrow morning, seven sharp,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
I didn’t have any idea what I was doing that first morning, but gradually I learned. I learned how to catch a bird in a net, how to weigh and measure and band it. I learned how to listen and how to wait, how to spend hours under a canopy of trees in volatile midwestern weather, how to spot well-hidden nests.
And now, a year later, I’m working with Pam on a long-term study evaluating the response of various species to deforestation and restoration in the Ozarks. We look at breeding patterns, predation, and the birds’ rate of return in clear-cut forests.
As we walk among the oaks and junipers, I can see the delineation between old and new growth from the last clear-cut. Ahead of me, Pam stops short, and I crouch down next to her. She’s peeking under a low bush, at an empty nest. As usual, she says nothing, waiting for me to see what she sees. And a moment later, I do—shell fragments, so small they’re barely perceptible to the naked eye. Unless you’re Pam, or have been trained by Pam.
“What do you think?” she says.