Michael A. Mares: 1945—: Mammologist, Field Biologist

After graduating from the University of New Mexico, Mares pursued his master's degree at Fort Hays State College in Hays, Kansas. There, he received thorough training in what he referred to as the "ologies" in A Desert Calling: Life in a Forbidding Landscape: mammalogy, herpetology, ornithology, ichthyology, plant and animal ecology, wildlife ecology, field biology, human ecology and conservation, the biology of the Southwest, and comparative physiology. He was then accepted to the Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was sent into the deserts of South America to study mammals. Mares claimed mammalogist Oldfield Thomas as his hero; Thomas named nearly 3,000 species and subspecies of mammals during his lifetime.

Mares has devoted much of his career to studying desert mammals and how they have adapted to survive in what is commonly seen as a hot, dry wasteland. To the average observer, it might seem that Mares' job is a tedious and boring one. "The animals that I study are not as charismatic as the African lions …," Mares wrote in A Desert Calling. "I have focused instead on the uncharismatic, the rodents and other small mammals that pass remarkable lives mostly hidden from view.…" What keeps Mares intrigued, he continued, is that "Field biology involves daily encounters with the wondrous."

Field biologists, especially those who work in foreign countries, face disease, accidents, bureaucratic glitches before their work even starts, often for months or years at a stretch. While many scientists deplore fieldwork, because it often takes place under appalling and dangerous conditions, Mares thrives on it. "Mares has put himself into great discomfort and occasional danger in nearly every desert of the world, largely because he is consumed by a personal quest to understand …," colleague Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his foreword to A Desert Calling.