My Liberal Arts

There are many reasons I am thankful I went to St. Olaf. Going into all of those reasons would take far too much time out of my so-far-perfect day, so I will now just explain the one which has contributed the most to this day's beauty. It's the liberal arts. When I applied to colleges, I knew that I wanted to eventually go to medical school, but I also knew that I enjoyed most school subjects, even beyond the ones I was most interested in. St. Olaf helped me appreciate a well rounded education even more. I could talk about all the phenomenal professors and fantastic classes I had for hours, but here I'd like to focus on the one class that has had, in an unlikely way, the biggest impact on my appreciation for the world that I live in. The class: Vertebrate Biology.

I can recognize bird calls. My friends look at me as if I'm insane. I was elected to the medical student council in large part because my personal statement was the most unique: I somehow tied my enthusiasm for the job to my experience skinning and stuffing a squirrel. When I likened removing the skin from our cadaver to my semester project that involved skinning both a red fox and a newborn (stillborn) fawn, even my lab professors had to stop what they were doing, look at me, take a moment to comprehend, and then go back to work.

Clearly this was a unique class, and it's one that I didn't have to take. Once I realized that I wasn't going to major in biology, there was no reason for me to take any more biology classes except for my own pleasure. I decided to take Vertebrate because I had heard that the professor, Gene Bakko, was one of the most interesting, most enthusiastic, most caring professors out there -- and it was true. Even though my idea of fun was not necessarily memorizing the classification system of all Minnesota vertebrates (e.g. moose: Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Artiodactyla, Family Cervidae, Genus Alces, Species alces -- and yes, I had to look it up on Wikipedia), the experiences I had in that class, including the 6:30 a.m., 3-hour, required field trips in the surrounding wilderness to look for waterfowl, were unforgettable. When else in my life would my response to seeing a dead wild turkey on the side of the highway be to pull over, investigate the partially disemboweled bird, take my gloves and trash bags out of my car, carefully pick up and package the still-warm turkey in plastic, secure it in my trunk, and excitedly bring it in to Professor Bakko the next day? (Yes, the turkey stayed in my trunk overnight. Don't worry, the temperature was essentially that of a refrigerator.)

I have a new respect (not to mention knowledge) of nature because of Vertebrate Biology and Professor Bakko, which is something that I appreciated today during my run in the gorgeous, 55-degree, sunshiney weather. I saw a juvenile red-tailed hawk. No, it wasn't flying or high up in a tree; it was on the ground, 10 feet away from me, hungrily tearing out the organs of a freshly killed squirrel. I watched it for a while, thinking to myself how amazing the circumstances were, thankful that I could appreciate the beauty of the scene. I also had the chance to observe other people's reactions to it. One middle-aged man out for a walk on his own was clearly excited; he pulled out his cell phone and began taking pictures. A set of young boys yelled to each other to hurry up and come see it, smiling and laughing and trying to inch closer until their parents yelled at them. One 5- or 6-year-old boy mischievously threw pinecones toward it; I think he was just curious to see what it would do, but it was still sad to watch him try. Luckily, his parents yelled at him, and the hawk just kept eating its delicious meal. A group of three teenage girls, probably high school age, thought the scene was interesting but disgusting, crying out things like, "Ewww, I'm gonna barf!" "That's so cool!" "Poor squirrel!" and, "That's so disgusting!"

Personally, I didn't feel bad for the squirrel. I was actually wishing that I could get closer and see its little organs, now that I've seen what the human equivalents look like. The hawk, though, was beautiful and fierce and an incredible sight to see. I wonder if it killed the squirrel, or if the squirrel was already dead. It looked really fresh, so I'm guessing the hawk killed it. Cool.