There are two things I enjoy most about my work. First, I get to work with interesting and enthusiastic people who are also fired up about science. Second, every once in a while I have moments in which I suddenly understand the solution to a problem that I've been working on - those are great moments.

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems.

An act of leadership is to say that whatever's happening now is not good enough and suggest or show that we can do better. If you don't have that, then you don't have the catalyst for continuous improvement.

Successful ecologists are successful in part because they have prepared their minds to attack scientific problems using a variety of intellectual tools.

There are two things I enjoy most about my work. First, I get to work with interesting and enthusiastic people who are also fired up about science. Second, every once in a while I have moments in which I suddenly understand the solution to a problem that I've been working on - those are great moments.

Elementary school children are very impressionable

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.