Faculty Focus Archive
Interviewed by Allen Wells
During his senior year at Yale in 1975, Nat took a course from renowned ornithologist Charles Sibley. When Nat approached his professor midway through the semester about his interest in traveling to South America after graduation that spring, Professor Sibley replied, “How about I give you a salary, a check book, you go buy a truck and a trailer, and you get yourself down to Colombia and Ecuador and collect birds for me?” Sibley wanted Nat to collect bird blood samples for his pioneering taxonomic studies using DNA hybridization. Since Nat had only taken a single Spanish course, the budding ornithologist convinced his mentor to provide enough funding so he could bring along his then-girlfriend (now wife) Genie Stevens, whose facility in Spanish far outshined his. As Nat relates, “He agreed to hire both of us, gave us a checkbook and off we went in the summer of 1975... With our truck and trailer, we got on a boat in New Orleans and went to Barranquilla, Colombia. We drove all over the entire country, doing field work, collecting samples of tropical birds for six months in Colombia and two months in Ecuador.” Armed with more than enough bird blood samples, Nat and Genie then travelled down the Pacific coast from Ecuador to Peru and Chile, before crossing the Andes to Argentina and then Bolivia.
In 1978, Nat began graduate school at the University of Washington where his advisor, noted tropical ecologist Gordon Orians, convinced him to take a two-month, intensive course in tropical ecology run by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). A follow up grant took Nat up to the Costa Rican highlands on the Continental Divide in a small Quaker community called Monteverde, where he would subsequently begin thesis research on seed dispersal by tropical fruit-eating birds. As Nat explains, “The birds swallow fruits and an hour later they either defecate or regurgitate the seeds, and then the seeds germinate. The interaction between birds and fruits really dictates what a forest looks like because seed dispersers are responsible for how seedlings get established.” Nat and Genie’s extended love affair with Latin America’s flora and fauna, language and peoples was on.
More than most scholars, you’ve made it a point to share the “tropical fruits” of your research with interested students in Brunswick and in Latin America?
NW: One of the benefits of conducting research in the field is the interaction with other researchers. Working with graduate students brings a level of intellectual engagement that I thought I could bring back to the classroom at Bowdoin. That led to my teaching on two dozen OTS courses in Costa Rica, including some in Spanish through the Spanish language counterpart of OTS, the OET, La Organización para Estudios Tropicales. In 1997 I was a visiting faculty member on the first OTS undergraduate seminar program.
Teaching in the field did “cross-pollinate;” it led to a wonderful team-taught course with you, Allen, called Environment and Society in Latin America, which we taught on three occasions. Several of my Bowdoin honors and independent study students have ended up doing research in ecology in Latin America, including Peter Hodum ’88, Evan Fricke ’11, Francis Joyce ’13, and several others. In fact, I just saw one of them, Sheela Turbek ’13, at the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Society in Tucson. Sheela’s PhD research aims to unravel the evolutionary history and ecology of a fascinating group of seed-eating birds in Argentina. It’s an ambitious project but with her experience on Kent Island and courses in Latin American Studies, she’s perfectly prepared.
Where else have you taught in Latin America?
NW: I taught an 8-day long modular course for graduate students in Bolivia at an isolated field station in 2000. The entire course was in Spanish. That was a wonderful experience. In fact, one of the students from that course is now a professor of ecology in Bolivia, and is one of the scholars we recruited to help with the translation of the Monteverde anthology. Then in 2008, I taught a different course on plant-animal interactions in Santiago de Cuba, for graduate students, faculty and civil servants, again in Spanish. I led a semester-long Colby-Bates-Bowdoin course in Ecuador in 2001 with 14 students in which we studied ecology from the Amazon to the Galápagos to the paramo (high treeless plateau).
I also had a Fulbright grant that allowed me to do research in Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 1989. In addition I’ve given papers at ornithology and ecology meetings in Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama and Brazil. I also have been to Cuba on two additional trips, the first in 2000 with Genie and Allen, as part of a tour of educational institutions and a second trip with the Brunswick-Trinidad Sister City program. All told, I lived in Central and South America four years or more.
So, all of this is a tangled web of really enriching wonderful experiences in Latin America. I’m thankful for being married to a Spanish professor for many reasons, but one of them is that she was able to tutor me in Spanish to the point where I can I feel comfortable now giving seminars in Latin America in Spanish.