ENHS Nature Trails Mar 99 Article 1

This month's speaker: Phil DeVries

Nature Trails conducted a brief interview with our speaker:

Were you interested in nature as a child?
Of course. My earliest memory is of staring down at an ant colony pull grains of soil out of their nest. After that the symptoms got worse.

Parental influences?
My father was an avid walker, and I was always tagging along through the fields and woods. We stopped a lot and looked at plants, herps and insects.

Any nature hobbies?
Family involved (current &/or childhood)? As I said I have always been interested in insects. Never had any nature hobbies per se. Its always been more of a profession or a philosophy.

Early teacher or mentor influences?
In grade school a teach let me keep insects and spiders alive in jars in the room. At the University I was deeply influenced by Herb Wagner the botanist, Dan Janzen the ecologist, and the writings of Henry Walter Bates, Darwin, Spruce, Wallace and other naturalists.

Formal education?
Univ Michigan undergrad & PhD at U of Texas, but it was and is mainly the forest that continues the formal education.

Memorable experiences, memorable travels?
After having lived in Central & South America, and worked in Southeast Asia, Madagascar and SW China? Sure lots of memorable experiences, and it would take a long time to relate them all.

How did you get into your present line of work?
The question should be rephrased, why didn't I ever get out of my current profession. I did become a professor though because research money for independent work was drying/dried up.

What brought you to our town?
A job at U of O

What are you going to talk about?
Butterfly diversity in the tropics, how to measure it, and why we are writing epitaphs. The usual stuff.

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