Education
B.A. in Biology, University of California, Riverside, 1985
My first attempt at college was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as a Regent’s Scholar with a language major and an art minor. However, after three and a half years I realized that I didn’t want to teach Spanish––just speak it––and that a portfolio was more important than a degree to find work as an artist. So I quit school, moved to Oregon, lived in a tipi while building a house, and began to raise Hollin, my firecracker of a daughter.
Twelve years later, with a new focus, I enrolled at the University of California, Riverside, and started all over again, this time in the sciences with such courses as physics, chemistry, and calculus. That effort resulted in a B.A. in biology.
Honors included membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the Watkins Award for outstanding woman of the graduating class, and the Jaeger Award in Field Biology. The Jaeger Award was especially gratifying, because Edmund Jaeger (that admirable, tough, old desert rat) had been a misogynist, and when he established the award, he stipulated that it had to go to a male student. By the mid 1980s UCR recognized that this policy was uncomfortably wrong, and I became the first woman to receive the award. The victory of breaking that barrier felt as important as the award itself.
Professional Ornithological Associations
Western Field Ornithologists: past president (their first woman president)
Arizona Field Ornithologists: current member of editorial board
Arizona Bird Committee: former member