Hi, I'm Mike Neeley. I'm a graduate from Evergreen; I was in the field biology program.
	Mike on the Evergreen beach

Evergreen has really great resources. The beach and the forest that surround it are wonderful resources for future naturalists. You can go out and check out the plant life and the birds, surprisingly enough, there's deer...

	Evergreen's beach looking North		Evergreen's beach looking South

	Canopy on the half-mile beach trail		Barnacles (Chthamalus dalli) on Evergreen's beach (1,000 meters on Puget Sound)

			I started out in the Nature of Natural History and Field Natural History. I also took a Temperate Rain Forests program, and did a number of individual contracts in mammology, ethnobotany, botany, entomology and so forth. I think that the individual contract setup offers a lot of flexibility for folks that are interested in expanding their knowledge of the world because a lot of time you don't have the chance to take the class when its offered or the class might not be exactly what you wanted to take. So you get the opportunity to form a class for yourself and your interests and also expand that knowledge base for yourself.

			The curriculum at Evergreen offers a unique blend of field experience and classroom time - something you don't often find at other undergraduate colleges. One thing that I found lacking at my prior colleges, where we spent all the time inside classrooms... and we never really got any practical field experience. That's the main reason I wanted to go to college; I wanted to go and get out in the field and learn about the natural world around me, and I didn't feel that learning out of textbooks was appropriate.

			After I left Evergreen that proved to be right, because I started working for an environmental consultant on my great blue heron study. I was informed by my employer that employers in the natural sciences look for Evergreen graduates because you leave with a lot of practical field experience that other students are lacking.

	When I finished the great blue heron study I was looking for work and decided to join the Peace Corps. When I joined, they placed me in the Republic of Panama and I had the oppportunity to teach environmental education and natural history to Panamanian youth.

	I also had the opportunity to make some contacts at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which was a stroke of luck. I went in to talk to a scientist there and he started reviewing my background and what I thought was an informal meeting turned into a job interview, of sorts. He offered me a position as a field ornithologist after about two hours, after hearing my work with the natural history here at Evergreen.
			STRI Lab Barro Colorado Nature Monument

	So through that I began working on a joint project called the Important Birds Areas of Panama. That was a project with the Panama Audobon Society and the Smithsonian, and they sent me on expeditions to remote areas of Panama where I catalogued the bird species and counted them.
			STRI Fortuna Research Station Fortuna Forest Reserve (20,000 hectares) Chiriqui Province, Panama

			Evergreen has really good faculty... they serve as really good role models. Probably one of the most memorable things that happened while I was a student in the Natural History program was ... I guess was being a student of the faculty that ran that class, Dr. Steve Herman.

			When I first started we would go out on field trips in an old school bus that he had, and... I always enjoyed the natural world, but I never got over-exuberant about it, outwardly, in front of other people. It was, it was pretty amazing... while we were driving down the coast, in pretty heavy traffic, Steve just saw some tundra swans off to the side of the road and ripped the bus off the side of the road, jumped up screaming "Tundra Swans," and that's when I started getting really into the natural history thing. I was thinking, "If a sixty year old man can like, almost kill a busload of thirty people just to look at some tundra swans it must be pretty cool.

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