My Amazing Dad

A recent photo of him with a great-grandchild (by NBK)


My dad is amazing, three standard deviations above the norm. He is still cutting down trees with a chainsaw, splitting the logs, and feeding a woodstove for heat. I think he is doing it as much by force of habit as to save money on electricity.

His brain still holds the key identifying features of about 3,000 native plants, including what seems to be 99% of the native plants in Washington (he says only 50%), and 100% of the native birds (he says more like 80%). As a result, he has a constant series of phone calls and emails from younger folks inviting him to ride with them to some out of the way place to see plants and birds. He gets out at least once a week, more in the summer. During several trips last summer, he hiked all over the hills beside the Columbia River looking for a rare plant with a friend. He went on several backpacking trips last summer to look for plants.

He gathered together all of the Washington Native Plant Society plant lists for various hikes, and entered the data into a huge database, which he used to produce the individual hike plant lists that are accessible at
http://wnps.org/plant_lists/exploring_native_plants.html

If you poke around the UW herbarium plant website:
http://biology.burke.washington.edu/herbarium/imagecollection.php
you will find his work in many places. He supplied all of the data to build the maps showing which counties have each species. He is helping to write the Species Descriptions for this website, an enormous project that he keeps whittling away on. And he has a new Nikon camera that he is using to get photos of plants that don't have photos yet on the website. And he occasionally collects plants for the herbarium, because he knows which ones are missing from the collection. I think he deserves an honorary PhD degree in botany from the University of Washington (he already earned a B.S. in Chemistry from there) for this work.

He has done all of this since he turned 80 (he is now 87). What can I say? Wow!