Female

38

I was born on July 31st, 1971 in Seattle. I was raised in a barn while my mother built our house from scratch. 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. In the 8th grade, I received an "A" in Cryogenics for learning how to artificially inseminate a goat. I can also castrate one single-handed, but you really didn't want to know that, did you? I spent my holidays in the Icicle Canyon, sleeping in great big Army tents, exploring the Enchantment Lakes Wilderness and learning from the best adopted grandparents anyone could ever wish for. When I was 16, I decided to see the world, and headed to Paraguay for a summer to vaccinate children against Yellow Fever and other nasty diseases. Since then, I have been all over, but 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. I love my neighborhood of Judkins Park 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 be. I have dug for Mayan ruins and I nearly drowned in Costa Rica. My two favorite places on earth are Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and Spain, and last year I also visited Venice, London, and France. I once led a group of unsuspecting Finns in a live re-enactment of Gilligan's Island (see photos) I have searched alpine lakes for mating toads with crazy Spanish herpetologists. I'm a scientist/writer/documentary filmmaker/producer, sometimes all at once. I've extracted the DNA of 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. I travelled to Panama to test Spotted Antbird song discrimination, and I studied the songs of 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? I lived in Montana for a year learning how to make science documentaries. I spent six weeks on the Big Island of Hawaii, making a film about the evolution and conservation genetics of native Hawaiian birds, which first aired 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 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), but no BS. Struggling against the forces of evil and willing to risk everything for the truth.