ENHS Nature Trails Oct 98 Article 1

This Month's Speaker
Dave Wagner
Nature Trails Editor

I was born in the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan in 1945, on the thirteenth day of the atomic age. That is, the thirteenth day after a nuclear fission explosion was first used as a weapon of destruction. Despite such an apple-pie beginning, my Americanism was tilted by having been transported to India at the age of two months and not leaving until I was almost eighteen years old and graduated from high school. My parents were Methodist missionaries.

For reasons as simple as genes times environment, I was a nature nerd as soon as I could walk, even before I could read. I roamed mountain forests and lowland jungles from deep youth, as far as I was allowed freedom to go. I learned to associate freedom with wildness and wilderness. I loved it. I loved nature. I wanted to know everything about it. How did snakes move so fast? How do birds fly? What are the names of all the butterflies, and beetles, and birds, and ferns, and trees, and...? I made collections of butterflies, beetles, snakes and ferns.

I loved learning by watching. I could identify butterflies at fifty yards by their flight patterns. The Grand Duchess butterfly came out five days before the monsoons began. The beetles came out just after the monsoons began. It took only two weeks of rains for the oaks to sprout a filmy halo of ferns. There was only one fern that grew in the driest part of the Deccan Plateau, a wiry thing with roots wedged between the rocks of ancient tombs and the ruined walls of the village fort. Cobras were scary but predictable if you saw them first. A village had not just wild dogs and pigs, but also buzzards and cows and sparrows and mynahs and pigeons and flies and monkeys. Langur monkeys had no special affection for human beings.

I loved exploration and discovery. Without the means to explore and discover continents or lost valleys, I searched surrounding nature for discoveries. I found that earlier British students of natural history had recorded every butterfly I could catch or bird I could see. Only when I took up the study of ferns seriously, in high school, did I start finding things for which there were no records in scientific literature. That's what inspired me to become a botanist--the thrill of discovering something new. Sometimes new to the mountain, sometimes maybe new to science.

That possibility inspires and energizes me today in my work. I am a professional botanist. My childhood hobby led to graduate work in botany at Washington State University in the early 1970's. Research into the evolutionary ecology of sword ferns led to a Ph.D. and a job as director of the University of Oregon herbarium. I soon turned my attention from the ferns and flowering plants--for which I had received the best formal training possible--to the mosses, liverworts and lichens, for which available formal training was inadequate. There's nothing like a vacuum of knowledge to attract an explorer!

After seventeen years, when the tax revolt known as Measure Five caused the University to give its herbarium to Oregon State University, I was turned out to make a solo career with my botanical expertise. It's been challenging--hard at first but getting easier as I have learned to build a business as an independent scientist. My business, Northwest Botanical Institute, provides expert consulting to clients. Much of that consulting has, happily, involved exploring.

The interior mountains of southwestern Oregon have been the focal point of most of my work. Here there are unusual landscapes for someone used to the verdant slopes of the moister northwestern and coastal Oregon forests. Even the human habitation patterns are distinctive.

Keeping records of intensive explorations and microscopy of collections have led me to develop a collection of shapshots mosses and liverworts. The areas I have visited in the past four years (since I last spoke to the Eugene Natural History Society) and photomicrographs of mosses are the basis of my talk this month. I have stories to tell and discoveries to share. Please join me.

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