July 2010 Archives

I've played coy for a while now, but the time has come for me to share what I'll be up to on my upcoming sabbatical from Woodberry Forest School:

In the spring of 2011, I'll be working as an intern at Living Bird Magazine.



As you may already know (especially if you read my last entry), the magazine is a publication of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which explains my recent trip to Ithaca: I was meeting the editor, Tim Gallagher, in order to see the lab, meet some of the lab and magazine staff, and discuss our plans for next year.

The idea of working at LB came upon me a while back when I was thinking about what I'd like to do with my sabbatical trimester. Two obvious answers were "write" and "bird," but I was also thinking somewhat about my own professional development. I've spent the last three years as a faculty advisor to our school newspaper, including one trimester when my co-advisor was on her own sabbatical, but my actual experience with publications consists of working on the SPEC yearbook at Grey Culbreth Junior High (1978) and the Hillife yearbook at Chapel Hill High School (1980). While I've had plenty of experience writing for publications on a freelance basis, my knowledge of what happens on the other end of the lance is pretty much nil. Thus, as I considered my options, the thought of getting some hands-on experience at a magazine seemed to offer some practical benefits for my future work at Woodberry (and potentially for my future writing career).

Just applying for a trimester-long job didn't look like a workable idea, however, particularly given my dearth of journalistic experience. Luckily, asking to work for free makes you a much more appealing candidate. Unpaid internships are fairly standard at many magazines, and recent college graduates will apparently even fight to get them at major publications like Esquire or Vanity Fair (where one of my former students interned and now edits) in hopes of getting the contacts and experience necessary for kick-starting their careers. Obviously, I'm not in exactly that same position, but the basic idea made some sense to me: with Woodberry willing to provide me with living expenses, I wouldn't need the magazine to pay me, so an internship would be the best thing to pitch to the magazine in question.

But which magazine?

Well, given the abovementioned "write" and "bird" plan, I figured the best option would be a magazine devoted to birds and/or birding, and right there, bookmarked in my Firefox browser, was Cornell's very own magazine of exactly that sort. I had been fortunate enough to come in contact with Tim Gallagher through this 2005 article by Bookslut.com's Colleen Mondor, for which she interviewed each of us about our birding and writing experiences, so I shot Tim a note asking if he needed someone to spend a couple of months editing copy and/or making coffee--for free. (Yes, I said "for free" very clearly in my email's first sentence.) We agreed to meet and work out some of the details, and now that I'm back from that meeting, you can expect to see me posting from Ithaca starting sometime next spring.

In the meantime, all of you who do not already have subscriptions to Living Bird should click here and subscribe. You won't want to miss a single moment of the thrilling conclusion!


4:02 PM

I'm back. You may not have noticed my absence, but I'm back. In the course of trying to set up a little project that I hope to be telling you about shortly, a few days back I took a little spin up to western New York. It had been a long time since I'd been in that part of the world--fall of 1980, as a matter of fact, when my brother and three of our friends (Karen, Celia, and Annie) took my mom's Oldsmobile Omega for a college-research trip. I wanted to see Yale and Dartmouth and Princeton, while Annie wanted to visit the Coast Guard Academy and Karen was interested in a look at Cornell. Our first stop was at the latter, a school about which I knew nothing at the time, but once we piled out of the car in Ithaca, NY, I knew one thing: the place was absolutely beautiful. Cornell sits high on a hill overlooking the town of Ithaca and the waters of Lake Cayuga, and when the fall foliage is in full color, the scenery is pretty close to incomparable. It's not bad even in high summer:

But on that long-ago autumn day, we toured the campus, viewing some of the famous and precipitous gorge(ou)s that cut through the hilltops, and learned a little bit about the school's strong points, including its veterinary school and its hotel management program.

But somehow I never learned about its ornithology program.

If I had, perhaps I'd have applied, but as it was, I ended up applying to only one of the schools we visited--Yale--though we enjoyed our on-campus stay at Dartmouth the most of all. (The availability of beer in the basement of the frat house where we stayed may have influenced our thinking in this regard.) And that was basically all I learned about Cornell until some years later, when I began to get more seriously into my lifelong hobby of birding. Names like Arthur Allen and Louis Agassiz Fuertes (not to mention Carl Sagan and Vladimir Nabokov) gave me good reason to pay more attention to the reputation of the Home of the Big Red.

And that's how I ended up spending seven hours in the car last Tuesday heading up to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (Yes, it's actually called the "Lab," not "Laboratory.") The Lab itself is an enormous wood-metal-glass structure sitting in the famed 200-acre Sapsucker Woods preserve. There's a small lake, a number of small wetlands, and plenty of forest, with several miles worth of trail cut through so that visitors can wander about and see what might be of ornithological interest. That's not to mention a whole lot of feeders and nestboxes set up near the Lab building, which houses quite a few things: there's a visitors center featuring viewing areas (mainly of the lake and the feeder station), a small auditorium, a gift shop, a library with a bank of computers, and artwork and photography everywhere

(That's the library visible on the second floor, with the big viewing windows beyond it; those run all the way down to the viewing area in the atrium on the first floor, where you can see a few people checking out the pond from the comfort of the bench.)

Beyond the public areas of the lab, however, there are places for actual science (including a sizable bioacoustics lab) and places for publicizing the lab's efforts, including the home of the celebrated online birding guide All About Birds, and the editorial offices of Living Bird Magazine.


11:35 PM

Maybe I should try to get someone to publish it!

Honestly, after a long month of trying to get the idea on paper (a process somewhat elongated by the difficulty of trying to get the butt in the chair), it's something of a relief just to have the thing written. Now I just have to let Kelly read it over and tell me what needs fixing. I think it's still pretty raw.

Oh, yeah: pretty soon I should be having some hard news about a little project I hope to be working on in the next year. So keep your eyes peeled.


8:03 AM

Back in Big Bend, knowing that we'd exhausted most of our spring break travel possibilities, at least as far as finding new life birds in warm-weather areas goes, Dad suggested that we consider summer trips as well. Thus, with a few days free at the end of June/start of July, I suggested a quick trip to a northern state I'd never visited and a bird that is seen only there.

From a birding standpoint, our four-and-a-half day blitz of Michigan was entirely successful, as we logged the bird we were after: the endangered (only about 2000 exist in the whole world) and extremely local (nesting only in the jack pine forests of northern Michigan) Kirtland's Warbler. As a bonus, I also got my first Clay-colored Sparrow.

But from a photographic standpoint... eh, not so great.

Behold my only photo of a Kirtland's Warbler:

And now my slightly (but only slightly) better photograph of a Clay-colored Sparrow:

And this is something out in the jack pines. Your guess is as good as mine:

I've said many times that it's always great traveling with Dad, and it's always great to see new places and new birds, but based on the photos I took on this trip, I think you're going to have to take my word for it.


11:24 AM