Sarah B. Hrdy
I have spent my entire adult life engaged in a quest to understand not just who I am but how creatures like me came to be . . . What does it mean to be born a mammal, with the emotional legacy that makes me capable of caring for others, breeding with the ovaries of an ape, possessing the mind of a human being . . . to be a semicontinuously sexually receptive, hairless biped, with conflicting aspirations and struggling to maintain her balance in a rapidly changing world?—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, from Preface to Mother Nature (1999)
Today, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, associate of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and A.D. White Professor At Large at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. She has been elected to the California Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is sole author of five books and has co-edited several others.
She and her husband have three children and currently combine growing walnuts with habitat restoration on their farm in northern California.
Photo © 1988 Tom Zimberoff for Omni Magazine
On the Farm
One year we borrowed a herd of sheep to simulate long-gone elk grazing on newly planted native bunch grasses.
We put in native plant hedgerows to encourage beneficial insects near the orchards.
Deer visit the native "deer grass" planted by our neighbor, John Anderson.
Man-made ponds on the farm facilitate ground water recharge, attract wildlife, and provide a welcome respite from the summer heat.
A visiting swallowtail.
Yellow lupins make the best of an arid world by collecting water droplets.
Sunflowers are rotated with wheat and tomatoes on the cropland.
As children left the nest, we kept our kennel full.
View more photos of Citrona Farms here.
