My Avian Life Christopher Tucker

Around the age of four, my mother became my first teacher. In the summer, she would spend her days exposing my brother and me to various topics we seemed interested in, covering subjects ranging from ancient Egyptian history to cooking. Each lesson lent new energy to my newfound fascination with non-fiction and on my first day of first grade, I was the only six-year-old with a hard copy of Bugs: The World’s Most Terrifying Insects stuffed into his backpack. Throughout elementary school, my immense number of books on bugs earned me the title of “the Bug Guy” and, though family members praised me as being a rising entomologist, I did not consider insect studies, or wildlife studies in general, to be a career.

Then I discovered Roger Tory Peterson’s Birds of Texas. I fell in love with the book, taking it on every excursion my family took in the hope that, in the midst of our ventures, I might enjoy the sight of some unseen bird Peterson could help me identify. Through this process, along with reading it in my free time, I developed a lasting passion for learning about these creatures, where they lived, what sounds they made, even what strange behaviors the urgency to mate drove males to do. (If you don’t understand my last...