Shirt Tales
Cherish your wild side, Florida
When I first started working as a biologist at the Conservancy, I was handed two logoed, khaki field shirts. They were crisp and new and despite having a heck of a lot to learn, I remember feeling very official as I looked at myself in the mirror, like a young Jeff Corwin.
I laugh when I look at them now, hanging in my closet, all wrinkled and stained. The sleeves are missing buttons. The hems are frayed. The fabric is discolored, and years of walking through saw palmettos have left them looking like I lost a sword fight. There’s even some blood on there to make it more believable.
Thread by thread, the story of my time here is locked in those fibers, but as I look to move to this next chapter in my life, the memories will come with me.
Being a conservation biologist is a privilege, as far as I’m concerned. I like to think we experience a more authentic version of a place by constantly crossing the divide between city and wilderness. We get the full scope, end to end, and all the pros and cons that come with it.
I made that jump to the wilderness hundreds of times in my six years here and many of my fondest memories reside in those far-off places.
I’ve walked in the tracks of panthers and bears, skirted around alligators, waded through cypress swamps, nearly stepped on rattlesnakes, definitely stepped on a python, fell in mangrove muck, dodged thunderstorms, and watched sea turtles nest under a full moon.
I remember chasing a green sea turtle up and down Keewaydin in the dark, attempting to enclose her in a giant wooden box so we could put a satellite tag on her. A cloud of mosquitoes followed my every move. My sandy clothes clung to me in the damp summer night, like the wrapper on a melted bar of chocolate. There are few times I’ve been more uncomfortable in my life, but I’ve never felt quite so alive.
In Ten Thousand Islands, I sat with Jeff on his old mullet skiff, baking in the sun for weeks as we tried to catch Kemps ridley sea turtles. I can envision every bend and bay of the back route to Gullivan Key. The hours spent talking, hauls full of nothing but seaweed, Houdini the escape artist turtle, and the hammerhead that circled our boat will stay with me for a lifetime.
I’ve counted fish, mangroves, frogs, invertebrates, birds, eggshells, seedlings, and tortoises. Spent hours sitting in the mud, kneeling in sand, and wading through the swamp, carrying all manner of odd equipment.
But not all my memories belong to the wild.
In the office, the back door to the python lab makes a certain rattle when it closes and I made a point of checking in whenever I heard the sound. My heart used to pound through my chest when I’d walk in and see the giant snake(s) they’d brought in that day. After going on enough “missions” with the team though, I started to calm down around them and I remember trying to explain this shift in perspective to someone that hated snakes by saying “it takes a bit of rewiring to get used to being around them.” He quickly scoffed at this and suggested it was “more like a lobotomy.”
I came to know Florida as a land of details. The wrinkled brow of a thunderhead or the tiny spider in a wildflower. You can find such incredible beauty in the smallest lines and through my camera and pen, I always sought to illuminate those things that revealed themselves to me.
I like to think I did it all in pursuit of some greater cause and although I know that was a big part of my motivation, I can’t help feeling a little selfish as well. Like I got into this field for the sense of adventure and thrill I would receive from a life lived outdoors. But the way we offer the world our best is by doing what we’re best at. The things that bring us selfish joy are the things that help us contribute.
I want to thank everyone at the Conservancy who has helped me to learn and grow over the years. Every staff member that encouraged and guided me, every volunteer that befriended and cheered me on. This has been an incredibly formative time, filled with memories I will cherish forever.
But I also want to thank our supporters.
Without the backing of the community, this organization would simply not exist. This incredible group of people would have never gathered, and these memories of mine…well, they wouldn’t be mine.
Though you may not have been there to see it, your support allowed me to be a witness, and in many ways, that makes these memories as much yours as they are mine.
This is perhaps one of the greatest values of conservation, to save our wild side and allow for experiences that could happen nowhere else. Whether you witness it yourself or not, these feelings and exploits, through story and imagery, spill over to the rest of the world. They provide our lives and communities with colors that could only be blended by nature.
As I get ready to leave, I find myself wishing every region of the world had a “Conservancy.” That every place had people looking out for the land.
Thousands of acres in Southwest Florida have been protected, in part or in full, because of the work that has been done here. And it was all enabled by you. Take pride in that, but know that it did not come easy and will always require safeguarding.
In the end, environmental organizations like the Conservancy of Southwest Florida are truly the mouthpieces for communities' environmental concerns, megaphones for us all to speak up as one.
Separate, we can make a racket, but together we can make a difference.
I may be leaving, but I’m taking the shirts with me. They’ve got too much to say. Who knows, maybe I’ll frame one like a retired baseball jersey so every time I look at it I’ll be reminded of this little corner of the world and the amazing power we hold when we work together.
Thank you everyone for these last few years. They’ve truly been a gift.
-Leif
