Secret Fun Facts

I was born on the 31st of July, 1971, during the Apollo 15 lunar landing, in Seattle, to the daughter of a WWII pilot & diplomat and the son of a clothing salesman & chicken farmer. It was the warmest day of the hottest week of the dryest month of the year, and also a Saturday. In fact, it has never rained on my birthday in Seattle ever since. All of which is completely irrelevent.
I was raised in a barn while my mother built our house from scratch. This was the barn a few years after we lived there. The room with the three colored windows was my bedroom.

This is the house my mother built. She still lives there.

I was a solitary child, and had my own woods to explore for hours on end, with only my animals for company.

When not out in the woods you'd find me in Santa's Workshop, making the dreams of other children come true, or selling wooden puzzles for my mother at the Pike Place Market.

In between all that, I raised a herd of dairy goats as a 4-H project. They lived in the barn after we moved out.

I spent my holidays in the Icicle Canyon, near Leavenworth, Washington, sleeping in great big Army tents, exploring the Enchantment Lakes Wilderness and learning from the best adopted grandparents anyone could ever wish for. Bill and Peg are in their 90s now, and no longer embarking on their epic hikes, but if even just a little bit of them has rubbed off on me, I am lucky indeed. http://www.camelotmedia.com/enchantment.html

When I was 16, I decided to see the world, and headed to Paraguay for a summer to vaccinate children against Yellow Fever, polio, tetanus, measles and other nasty diseases.

Since then, I have been all over, digging for Mayan ruins in Belize, studying bird vocalizations in Panama, nearly drowning in Costa Rica. My two favorite places on earth are Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (where I danced and played fiddle till the cows came home) and Spain (where I went hunting for toads in the middle of the night in frigid alpine lakes with a half-crazed herpetologist), and last year I also visited Venice (where I got lost wandering the streets at 4AM) and London (where nothing particularly noteworthy happened), and I led a group of unsuspecting Finns in a live re-enactment of Gilligan's Island, which was an awful lot of fun, and we all jumped in the sauna after.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that travelling and milking a herd of goats twice a day are mutually exclusive activities, so I packed up the blue ribbons and moved to the city. These days, you'll find me in Judkins Park...I love my neighborhood and the friendships and community that are built around bumping into people you know on a daily basis and working on projects together to make it a better place, where people want to live.

I'm scientist, writer & producer, sometimes all at once. I have a thing for birds. I've taught basic biology, animal behavior, environmental science and remedial (!) sex-ed to undergraduates. I have a master's degree in Animal Behavior from the University of Washington where I studied the evolution of bird song learning. In Panama I tested vocal discrimination in Spotted Antbirds, and for my master's thesis, I studied songs and aggression in Townsend's and hermit warblers across a transect of hybridization in the Cascade mountains. Think about it - you need to sing to get a mate, and different species sing different songs, so what would you sing if you were half of one species and half of another? http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5809902/

I lived in Montana for a year learning how to make science documentaries, which gave me the opportunity to spend six weeks on the Big Island of Hawaii, making a short National Science Foundation documentary about the evolution and conservation genetics of native Hawaiian birds. It first aired on September 22, 2005 on Montana PBS: www.montanapbs.org/Terra/episode105/ . Then in October, I was invited to present my film in front of a French audience at a film festival there. They did a fabulous job of dubbing the whole thing into French, and were extremely gracious despite the fact that my French is terrible. They love their birds in France!

But who am I really? Just a nice girl, with most of her ducks in a row (except that little yellow one that keeps running off and quacking by itself all the time), keeping herself entertained with good friends and funny stories, a touch of sarcasm (okay, a lot of sarcasm), but no BS. My life has never been easy, but it is humor that gets me through each day. Battling against the forces of evil and willing to risk everything for the truth.

Sunset at Three Sisters, near Tumalo, Oregon, 2004