Birding with an old timer
In my last post I got a little ahead of myself, jumping from the Wilson meeting at UMBS in 1974 to Princeton in 1976, without any attention to my time at Smith College. That was a sufficiently significant period, ornithologically, that I don’t want to gloss over it.
I was plopped down in western Massachusetts in the middle of winter 1975, after 7 amazing months of academic freedom at Manomet Bird Observatory followed by a birding trip to the tropics, so it was a shock to the system. My most memorable course at Smith was Evolution and Systematics, my first really rigorous introduction to the necessary framework of ornithological research and nearly my undoing. Stephen Tilley taught the course, and it was a doozy. Population genetics caught me completely unaware and I go