My whole career has been based on field work:
I'm a field person and I've been a collector all my life, from infancy practically. I started with matchbook covers and bottle caps and other junky things like that. I learned real collecting techniques from my father's graduate students, one of whom was a mammal person.
My first extended work in the tropics was in Panama in the mid-1950's with Gorgas Memorial Laboratory of Tropical Medicine. They took me down there on assignment from the Smithsonian to teach their field people how to catch arboreal mammals alive. They were looking for the host of Sylvan Yellow Fever, which periodically erupted into Central America and wiped out all the monkeys and a few people to the extremes of monkey distribution. When there were no more monkeys, that was the end of that Yellow Fever invasion.
So I taught field people how to catch arboreal rats and marsupials, sloths, and whatever else they could find in the canopy. The vectors of Sylvan Yellow Fever were known to be a couple of big husky mosquitoes that are endemic in the Amazon Basin and live in the canopy. Yellow Fever became known as Bridegroom's Disease in the Amazonian forest because young men would marry and set off into the forest to clear a homestead. They would cut down the trees, which brought the infected mosquitoes down to their level, and they then died of Yellow Fever, so it was Bridegroom's Disease.
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