When he arrived at Auburn University in 1993, fresh from postdoctoral work in Ontario, Dr. Geoffrey Hill was “Auburn’s primary bird man,” as he puts it in one of his books. He notes that, among the faculty of Alabama’s major universities, he was the only ornithologist around at the time and took to fielding bird questions from across the state. By that point, though, his interest in birds had already been growing for some 20 years — “literally since I’ve been 11 years old,” he explained. “I was always a kid fascinated by animals,” Hill added, and he would roam his Kentucky neighborhood with friends, collecting snakes, salamanders and insects. But when he began to learn the basics of bird identification, the bugs and reptiles were soon forgotten.
