Jeff Fair

Jeff Fair

Adjunct Biologist & Freelance Writer

Education:

Biography:

For over thirty years now, as an author and field biologist, I have followed loons and other wild spirits across the North from Maine to Alaska, studying them and writing about what my pursuit of them has allowed me to find. A wildlife biologist by formal training, I have along the way trapped and radio-collared grizzly bears in the Yellowstone back country, worn the badge and uniform of a Utah game warden (one career arrest), and introduced snakes to tourists as a US Forest Service naturalist in Oklahoma. But mostly I've studied loons-for eleven years as director of the New Hampshire loon recovery project and since 1991 as an independent consulting biologist-and minored in the ursine community. My recent technical publications include several as coauthor regarding the use of nesting rafts for common loons and the effects of mercury on common loons. In 2002 I authored Status and Significance of Yellow-billed Loons in Alaska (the Wilderness Society document that led to this species' current consideration for federal listing under the Endangered Species Act), and coauthored National Audubon's Western Arctic Summary and Synthesis of Resources. I've also assisted US Geological Survey and US Fish and Wildlife Service field research projects in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

However, my true study of life manifests itself in my essays and books, which tend to ponder the connections between humans and the wilder, natural world-generally, if I can help it, with a touch of humor and an uplifting message. I've published four books to date: The Great American Bear (NorthWord, 1990) and three children's wildlife titles. In recent years I've shifted my primary focus and livelihood to writing; I'm now a regular contributor to Audubon and Alaska magazines and Appalachia, where I'm a contributing editor. My essays and articles have also appeared in Natural History, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, Equinox, Ranger Rick, Wild Earth, and We Alaskans, and have been carried in numerous anthologies, most recently including 2007 National Outdoor Book Award recipient Arctic Wings (with Subhankar Banerjee et al., The Mountaineers' Books, 2006) and Travelers' Tales - Alaska (Travelers' Tales, 2003). I've also enjoyed performing the Forewords to Dave Evers' and Kate Taylor's two volumes: Call of the Loon and Call of the Northwoods.

In September 2007 I traveled to Washington, DC, to receive the National Press Club's Erik A. Friedheim Travel Journalism Award for the story I wrote in Audubon about Larry Aumiller and the bears at McNeil River Sanctuary in southwestern Alaska. I've made three trips to visit the restricted McNeil Sanctuary, two on Special Science/Education Permits awarded by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and one by bush plane in late winter when no one was looking. In 1998 the National Wildlife Federation presented me with its Farrand/Strohm Writing Award for another story on bears.

I still return to northern New England annually for short junkets as Senior Oversight Biologist (SOB) on many of my older projects and a few new ones, often as an adjunct to BRI. But my heart now resides in the Great Land. In recent years I've made more than a dozen research and writing trips into Alaska's Arctic, primarily seeking out Tuullik, the rare and elusive yellow-billed loon, and assisting in federal research projects thereon. I've also visited hundreds of classrooms around Alaska-on the road system and far out in the Bush-as an Author-Biologist In The Schools. Alaska has been my home for fourteen years, the past five of them in this quiet little cabin on the toe of Lazy Mountain, just across the river from Palmer.

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