User Profile

Things I love: field work, birds, my friends, preparing bird specimens, books, dancing, hosting Risk games & dinner party nights, cooking, the beach, rainforests, coral reefs, taking photographs of wildlife, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, Gator football, tailgating, birding, taking photographs of friends, my parakeet Darwin, my cockatiel Hermione, running in the summer rain, flip-flops, North Florida in March, Gator basketball.

Things I hate: narrow-mindedness, waste, driving in traffic, cockroaches in my kitchen, statistics programs that don't actually work, rap music, cigarette smoke, North Florida in July, prejudice.

Things I feel ambivalent towards: pop music, tennis shoes, North Florida in January.

Stuff that irritates me: people who are more concerned with the welfare of individual organisms than with the health of the entire population or the whole ecosystem the organisms are a part of (ie, bunnyhuggers) - especially in regard to introduced species; cell phones going off in class; self-inflicted ignorance; self-pity...

I want:
~to spend my life studying birds
~gender, racial, religious, and ethnic equality worldwide
~extinction rates to slow down & rainforest destruction to stop
~to go to Alaska, Peru, Venezuela, Trinidad, Ecuador, Antarctica, Madagascar, Kenya, Australia, SE Asia, Veracruz in October, the American West & Pacific Northwest, Maine, just about all of Europe...
~peace
~love
~to see a Whooping Crane courtship dance (in person, in the wild)
~a second UF football national championship a third a fourth UF football national championship
~a second UF basketball national championship a third UF basketball national championship
~a PhD

I am finishing a masters in zoology at the University of Florida. My research is focused on insular adaptations and gene flow between populations of birds in Trinidad and Tobago. I'm also a TA for the zoology department, currently teaching Functional Vertebrate Anatomy Lab. I teach the incredibly important skills of cat skinning, muscle dissection, bone identification, and (most useful) how to cut open an eye without squirting eye jelly all over yourself.

My journal is partly public, and partly friends-only. It depends on the subject matter and my mood at the time. Generally, the more personal the subject, the more likely it is to be friends-locked. I talk about all kinds of things in my journal, including my personal life and my research, which involves the collection of bird specimens. I hate killing birds more than most people will ever understand, but I believe it's important and necessary for research, and, when done properly, it has no impact on the local bird populations. If you have a problem with this, don't read my journal and you won't have to hear about it.

Friends (34):

Mutual Friends (28):

Also Friend of (10):