New Jersey tagged posts

Bridget with her first duck (a Black Duck!) at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey.

You might say my story is an unlikely one. 

I grew up in suburban Connecticut, where many of my peers’ interests centered around video games or the mall.  Yet I was always happiest exploring the neighborhood woodlot
and nearby marshes.  In college I studied biology at a liberal arts school in Massachusetts that specialized in producing future physicians.  Instead, I chose a career in wildlife conservation.  I took up hunting about six years ago, but going by demographics alone (as a young, suburban, college-educated woman from the northeast) – it’s reasonable to predict that I might have instead held some anti-hunting views.   

I confess I laughed out loud at part of Jodi Stemler’s rec...

A Life Among the Silver Backed Males

I work in a pretty male-dominated field. I remember 20 years ago when I was interning for a wildlife conservation organization, my supervisor described our colleagues as “silver backed males,” a fairly apt description for the typically gray-haired men leading most of the conservation movement at the time. At the first conferences I attended, I was often struck by how skewed the gender demographics were in traditional wildlife management.

Jodi Stemler

I felt I had another strike against me as I was trying to shoulder my way in to the profession, because I grew up in the most densely populated state in the country. New Jersey – little bitty state, lots and lots (and lots) of people...