Eventually the curator of ornithology, the bird curator left for another position in another zoo, and I was offered the bird curators job and I jumped at it. And that was really when my work as a curator began. And I was at the zoo for a good many years as curator and got to a point where I realized that if I was to learn more about wild animals and to realize my vision of helping to make the zoo a somewhat different kind of organization, to involve it in wildlife conservation, which was becoming apparent to me as a growing need, that I’d have to be able to greatly increase my opportunities and understanding and work with other people. New York seemed the best place to go. That was where the famous curator Lee Crandall was working with whom I was in correspondence. It was where William Beebe, the famous naturalist who went down in the bathysphere and studied tropical birds was working. And so I tried to get a job in New York. I took a few years, but I managed to do that eventually.
