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Maria Whitehead grew up on a farm, raising a great horned owl in her mom’s kitchen. She continues the family conservation ethic today as a TNC-SC project director, ornithologist, and wife of TNC-SC Assistant Director of Land Protection Ryan Olson. Maria studied avian ecology for her PhD in natural resources from Clemson University. She joined TNC in 2007.

Nature.org:

Maria Whitehead:

Probably Solomon, the great horned owl we raised in my mother's kitchen when I was 7. Since then, I've made custom hand puppets to feed orphaned great horned owls and know that what was going on in the Whitehead kitchen was both illegal and not necessarily in the best interest of our owl. The only thing I can say in our defense is my brothers and I were all in elementary school, and three of us went on to work in conservation — the younger as director of land protection for a small land trust, myself as an ornithologist and project director at TNC, and the eldest as a board member for the Wildlife Federation. After his release, "Solly" likely spent the rest of his days longing for a mate just like my mom, but he had a tremendous influence on three kids growing up on a farm in South Carolina.

Nature.org:

Maria Whitehead:

That's easy. We were looking at the toxicity of a pharmaceutical drug that was decimating old-world vultures in India and Pakistan. It was important to understand whether the drug had the same effect on our new-world vultures, like the turkey vulture. I drew the short straw and was the researcher in charge of catching the birds each time we needed to draw blood. Vultures have an amazing effective defense mechanism when they feel threatened. Imagine how bad road kill smells, and then imagine it after a day or so in a vulture's gut. I had been forewarned about the experience of being vomited on by a vulture. I remember a tale of my grandfather's that involved him stripping down after an unfortunate encounter with a vulture and driving home in his underwear. The soiled clothes flying out of the car window later caused the paint to peel off his car! I've never encountered anything quite like it since.

Nature.org:

Maria Whitehead:

"Chubby Checker." I was on the phone with our director of land protection, and we were racking our brains about funding for an important land protection project near Andrews, SC. The town reminds guests as they cross the city limit with a sign that reads: "Welcome to the Home of Chubby Checker." If you've forgotten, Google informed me that he was born in 1941, and Dick Clark's wife gave Chubby his last name. His billboard hit, "The Twist," stayed on the charts for 18 weeks and "revolutionized pop culture." We imagined the fund-raising bash we could throw with Chubby's help. I'm too embarrassed to go any further with this vision, but I bet you can guess how it ends.

Nature.org:

Maria Whitehead:

I'm not sure I can adequately capture this scene. I was 22 and working as an intern for the School for Field Studies at their campus in the rainforest of Queensland, Australia. I had taken some of the students on a hike in hopes of seeing the endangered Cassowary. The Cassowary stands five and a half feet tall and is the crazy Aussie rainforest version of an ostrich. As good fortune would have it, we spotted one! We watched as the bird overtook our binoculars. Understand that the clawed fourth digit on the tarsometatarsus of a Cassowary can disembowel a human with one kick. My students scattered, and the Cassowary, clearly habituated, had his sights set on me. I remembered the instructions for this situation: Don't run. Stand still with arms up and make like a tree. I did this, but the Cassowary was not fooled. He approached again. I ran to a new spot and pretended again to be a tree. No luck! On the third try, I closed my eyes tight and let the Cassowary get close enough to sniff me. I could hear my students laughing in the distance. Once the bird was sure I had no food to share, he wandered off disinterested, and I was certain this must be my penance for habituating our childhood owl!