Biodiversity > Being a Conservation Biologist: Eleanor Sterling

Eleanor: When I was little, my dad and I went to a concert where people sang songs in different European languages. I was so impressed when he could translate all the songs for me.

It made me determined to understand other languages, and it inspired me to study French, German, and Spanish in high school. I also studied Latin, which not only helps you understand English better but is also the language of science — all scientific names of animals and plants are in Latin. In college I learned Russian and since then I've taught myself Swahili and Malagasy and I'm working with a tutor to learn Vietnamese.

Languages help you better understand how other people think and to reach out to people from other cultures. Knowing all these languages opens doors for me; people appreciate that I try to learn their language instead of expecting them to know mine.

Eleanor: Sixty years ago, Aldo Leopold changed the way everyone thought. He said that nature was complicated and compared it to a watch that works well. At first it might seem like what you see is what's important. But it's the way the watch parts that you don't see work together that makes the whole watch work so well.

Another person who was very important, Rachel Carson, made people think about how anything we add to our environment, like pesticides, has an effect.

They're both people who changed the world by changing the way we think. Both were passionate about their work. I tell my students that they too can make a difference if they work hard and convince others with their passion and depth of knowledge.

Eleanor: Even today, girls face challenges. When most people think of scientists, they think of men. Women scientists in the United States are still a minority. I was very lucky when I was young. My parents, teachers, and counselors were always careful to encourage me to pursue any career that I wanted: scientist, doctor, or lawyer.

But there was one thing that was an obstacle: participating in sports. When I was a girl, the most extreme sport for girls was basketball. I wanted to run. To do this I had to join the boys' running team, but that didn't stop me. I was the only girl on the team, and boys would huff and puff trying to beat me in races. When I won, many of the boys felt badly because a girl had beaten them.

Eleanor: I grew up in northern California in a neighborhood where houses had solar panels to make their own electricity. The nearby streets only had one lane to encourage people to ride bikes instead of driving their cars. I always loved animals, and my mom and dad took us to places like Monterey and Big Sur, where we'd watch the sea lions . We'd go on camping trips to a dwarf pine forest and see how the local geology affected how the trees grew.

My sixth-grade teacher was my earliest inspiration. She showed films about animals and nature and took us on field trips. After one class trip to a veal-producing farm, I became a vegetarian. The main thing this teacher taught us was that we all make choices that affect the world around us.

Eleanor: I am obsessed with reading and have been since I was a kid. I would read comics, seed catalogues, anything really, though I especially liked historical fiction and history. I was so obsessed that I brought a book to read when I went out to dinner with my family—in case the food took a long time to arrive!

I always wanted to teach. At first I wanted to teach primary school, then middle school, and then, when I got older, I wanted to teach teachers. These days I teach at Columbia University in New York, which I enjoy because students ask questions that make me think of things I hadn't thought of before. I encourage students to ask questions and to understand that there is often no single right answer to a question.

Eleanor: During college I spent a lot of time at the San Diego Zoo. That's what gave me the idea of working with primates in the wild. I wrote lots of letters to people with whom I thought it would be cool to work. I got accepted as a field assistant on a project studying baboons and went to Tanzania for a year.

The most rewarding and intense adventures in my life have occurred during fieldwork. One time in Madagascar we were sitting under a tree in pitch black in the middle of the night waiting for an aye-aye to come out of its nest. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a mass of fireflies began to dance, circling round in the air. The 25-minute natural fireworks show those fireflies put on was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.

Eleanor: People used to think that aye-ayes ate only insects, but they also eat fruit. We discovered their secret after I realized the aye-aye was eating something and then throwing it down from the trees.

The fruit the aye-aye eats is oval-shaped. It has an outer covering with a hard nut inside. We watched as the aye-aye used his front teeth to slice into the top of the outer covering. After he had finished with it, the top had slits all the way around, like an umbrella, and the nut was exposed. The aye-aye made a hole in the nut with his teeth and scraped out the nut meat using his third finger, throwing the rest of the fruit down from the tree on top of my head!