Love stories abound this time of year, so what better time to revisit Something Wild’s First Bitten series where we explore the story of what made biologists fall in love with biology? This story is about a boy and a girl, and the great outdoors. Julie Brown loves birds. She loves them so much, she made a living out of them. As the monitoring site coordinator for the Hawk Migration Association of North America , she counts birds, she tracks population and migration trends, she even plans raptor tours. And as with so many biologists, Julie Brown was first bitten by the nature love-bug at a young age. Julie grew up in coastal Massachusetts and was drawn to nature, she seemed to be always “exploring and crawling around tide pools and dissecting roadkill.” She even made close study of house sparrows in her field notebook, “sketching them and making observations of what they liked to eat. So I was always very curious about the natural world.” But the bite she remembers best actually came