“YEAH, THAT’S MY THING. THAT’S WHAT I WANT TO DO.”

A group of us went down to Baja California in a van. We camped out on the beach, swimming, spearfishing, kayaking, just enjoying Baja. I’d been studying engineering for a couple years, but I needed to figure out what I really wanted to do. At one point, I was hiking through some nasty cholla cactus and I saw an arrowhead in the desert silt. I’d never found anything like this. The weight of it in your hand, the beautiful chips—it was like the person who made it went way out of their way to make it absolutely perfect.

It was during this trip that I’d look out on the water and see feeding frenzies, hundreds of dolphins in the water below and thousands of seabirds above—frigates, boobies, pelicans—all hunting for fish. I said to myself, “Yeah, that’s my thing. That’s what I want to do,” and I never looked back. I transferred schools and got a PhD in ecology. That trip was a turning point for me, and while I don’t have a lot of pictures, I have this arrowhead.

~ James Gilardi, executive director, World Parrot Trust, Davis, CA