Michael Calver

I'm best described as a frustrated entomologist. After completing a PhD on grasshopper ecology in 1985, my early jobs as a research scientist (vertebrate pests), a secondary school teacher (a background in vertebrate pests was useful for this) and a Lecturer in Distance Education provided little opportunity for entomological research. I thought things were looking up when I accepted a position in the School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology at Murdoch University in 1994, but I soon discovered that the prospective research students mostly wanted to work on mammals, although birds were accepted grudgingly as a second choice. I thus became a de facto vertebrate wildlife biologist, with insects only entering the picture as food for ‘real animals’. With the exception of some brief flirtations with plant pathology and bibliometrics, terrestrial vertebrate wildlife remain, by default, my main area of research.