I plopped down exhausted in front of a notebook after a day collecting data on breeding birds, walking the sandy washes of the desert southwest for miles on end in the hundred degree heat.Īnd at the end of those exhausting days I squeezed out what little energy was left like the proverbial blood from a stone. I wrote down revelations by the light of headlamp or campfire. I scribbled down thoughts about scenes or characters on extra data sheets, in journals crouched in the back of my pickup, or sitting high on a boulder after a day backpacking into a remote field site. For the good part of a decade I tried to make it work with my two loves. The former has long, hard hours of physical labor and does not generally pay well enough to offer time and space for the latter. Biological field work and writing are two professions at odds with one another.
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