A day of field guides at #UCDavis and @Wired

Well, how perfect is this.  Today Wired ran a follow up "Birds, Poop and Roadkill: A field guide to Field Guides" to an article that came out last week about my drive for a full field guide to the microbes.  Last weeks article was "Book of Germs: The Quest for a Field Guide to Microbes."  It is by Daniela Hernandez and was a follow up on my talk at AAAS on "A Field Guide to the Microbes" which you can see on YouTube here.  I wrote a blog post with more detail on my obsession with field guides and microbes here.

While Daniela was writing the article I told her about how I collected field guides.  And I sent her a link to a private album I had made of me and my field guides which I am now making public:




For the follow up Daniela and a photographer from Wired Jon Snyder came to my office and lab and took some pictures of me and my field guides (with assistance from Russell Neches in my lab to help set up some of the "scenes).

Here are some pics from their visit.

And now today, the Wired article came out and and amazing coincidence happened.  I was taking a walk around campus with Misha Angrist who is giving a talk at UC Davis today.  And on the walk first we saw a collection of turkeys wandering around campus:

So my birding sense was turned up.  And then we walked across to the UC Davis Arboretum along Putah Creek and bumped into a "birding tour" of the Arboretum.  In six years here I have never seen one of these.  There were some teachers and kids carrying around field guides looking for particular species of birds.

And I note - one even had a field guide I do not have - the "Birds of Northern California" which I will be getting very very soon.  I think today will only serve to boost my obsession with field guides, but that is OK by me.

I note - I love the Wired photo spread of my field guides and my lab.  I particularly am happy that they includes some of the funnier field guides out there like "Flattened Fauna." And I am glad they got in Betsy Dyer's Field Guide to Bacteria because it is one of my favorite field guides of all time.  Thanks to Russell Neches for helping out with it and Daniela Hernandez and Jon Snyder for their work.