Or at least that’s what I have the most formal qualifications in.
I doubt I could have ever made it as a mathematician or a physicist (in fact I once spelt pysics wrong on top of a weekly test paper when I was doing my A-levels and quickly switched courses to botany instead).
However I suspect it’s much more likely because I grew up with a fascination of the natural world and was influenced by the likes of Gerald Durrell, David Bellamy and the books of Willard Price.
It also helped that we lived in what would be regarded as the countryside rather than in town, so my “playground” was the local woods and fields. I was naturally curious about the natural world around me, although when it came to studying it academically I was less enthusiastic. Classrooms and lecture theatres I loathed, but doing out in the field practical work was my thing. Theses on bird feeding followed, as did nighttime badger watching.
As I got older and my career progressed, I found myself much more involved in work that kept me indoors, I made some career choices that in hindsight I regret but at the time seemed like the right thing. I blame youthful ambition and the lure of a little extra money, but they were the right decisions at the time and if I’d chosen differently who knows where I might be or what I might be doing.
As I sit typing these words I have one eye looking out over the top of my laptop screen looking at the birds in the garden on the feeder so my passion is still there and hasn’t diminished over the years.
As I reached the milestone of solar orbits that originally inspired this newsletter this does have me thinking about how I want to spend the remaining years though. I’m unlikely to go back and do anything significant academically but I might perhaps explore other avenues of learning - you can teach an old dog new tricks. Or perhaps I should be inspiring the next generation of biologists? For a number of years I used to go back and give a lecture at my old university to the current students on the course that I was on - a kind of “and this is what I do now”, but I don’t think that’s what I have in mind either.
Maybe it’s just about sharing the marvels of the natural world, although there is plenty of that out there already too - trust me, I’m a biologist.
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