"Ouch!" I jerked my finger out of the fiddler crab's burrow in the black mud.
Hanging on was a little fiddler, with its outsized pincers biting into my finger.
At the time, I was four years old, exploring with my grandfather. I held up my
finger for him to see. "I guess this one didn't know me, Grandpop," I said.
My grandfather carefully pried open the big yellow pincers, relieving my pain.
The fiddler scurried back to its burrow.
I was lucky. My family had a cottage that stood on pilings in the New Jersey
salt marsh, within sight of the ocean. We went there to escape the stifling
summer heat of the Philadelphia area.
My parents sat on the porch enjoying the sea air. I lay for hours on a rickety
boardwalk, peering through the spaces between the boards and studying
the water below. There I saw a world that my parents never noticed.
Everywhere I saw life and action. I could hardly bear to leave this world
in the marsh when my mother called me to supper.
Back in the city, I liked school, especially science class. I rode my bicycle
long distances to collect and identify tree leaves for a science project. I
sifted the soil behind my garage because my teacher said I would find at
least ten different kinds of animals there. The creatures were all very tiny,
of course, but I was amazed at how much life there was right in my backyard.
For the first two years of college I took lots of chemistry and physics classes.
They were interesting, but I couldn't stay excited about laboratories and
test tubes. I wanted to work out-of-doors.
Off to Africa
I couldn't wait any longer to see Africa and its wildlife, so I joined the Peace
Corps and went to East Africa. There I worked in the wilderness, where I helped to
plan pipelines to bring clean drinking water to villages.
I loved Africa, but I seemed to be getting no closer to realizing my dream of
becoming a field biologist. Then something happened that changed my life.
Nearby, a biologist was studying the ecology of the black rhinoceros. He needed
assistants to find and watch the huge beasts and to help tranquilize them so that
tags could be put on their ears.
He asked the Peace Corps for helpers. A few days later, the boy who had met a
determined little fiddler crab so many years ago was now a young man, helping
to hold a groggy one-ton rhino while the scientist clipped a bright tag to its ear.
It was the turning point in my career. Suddenly I found what I had been looking for.
I returned to college and studied until I received a doctoral degree in wildlife
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