Part three – UC Berkeley

Background. I’d visited UC Berkeley (Chapter 1  School daze) as a high school student and instantly felt at home on campus and in Strawberry Canyon. Thus, transferring from Deep Springs to Berkeley seemed like a logical move. I would no longer have a full scholarship, but the cost of being a student in Berkeley was inexpensive, at least then.

I transferred to Berkeley in January 1964 and graduated in January 1966. Berkeley in the mid-60s was wild, both politically (Chapter 9  The power of a speech) and socially, especially for someone coming from the celibate isolation of Deep Springs.

Berkeley is also where I discovered academic and field biology (Chapter 10  Encounters with Great Blue Herons). Then immediately after I graduated, I took a two-month field course in Tropical Ecology (Organization for Tropical Studies) in Costa Rica. When I returned to Berkeley that March, I was lucky to get a job running the Herp Lab in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) while Dr. Robert C. Stebbins was on sabbatical in Australia. As I discuss later (Chapter 12  Why lizards?), that job qualified me for an occupational deferment from the draft (recall this was the Viet Nam War era) that lasted until I started grad school at the University of Texas Austin (September 1967). [At that point I got a regular student deferment.]

After working in the herp lab for about a year, I was invited to join Dr. Carl Koford and two grad students on a MVZ-sponsored field trip to the coastal deserts of northern Peru (summer 1967). I was the designated ‘herper’ in the group. Soon after we arrived in Peru, I encountered geckos (Chapter 13  In pursuit of geckos), which quickly became my favorite group of lizards.

I returned to the states at the end of summer and immediately moved to Austin to start grad school in Zoology. I went back to coastal Peru in the summer of 1968 to study the competitive ecology of some geckos (for my MA thesis). Then, after stints in the Kalahari (1969-70) and at Harvard (1971-75), I returned to Berkeley in 1975-77 as a Miller postdoc. Berkeley may sometimes resemble ‘Berserkeley,’ but it will always be home to me. Only there would one spot graffiti such as, “Social deviants unite!”