Sundew, Drosera rotundifolia

Who:
Raised by hyenas, accepted into 21 indigenous tribes- what do you expect? Kenneth E. Barnett (Kenny) is NaturalistGuy (NG).

Kenny was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of a Dentist/Artist Dad and housewife mom.  His father loved animals (but notably had a strong fear of snakes)- yet his father passed on his interest in science and evolution to Kenny.  As a boy, Kenny spent most of his time in the woods fishing, capturing and trapping almost any living thing he could.  If you consider the time a friend of his fell into one of his pit traps, he has also technically captured a human, LOL.  His room as a kid was full of turtles, lizards, tropical fish, mammals and rescued (or captured) birds from the neighborhood (and yes, hidden, several snakes).

At 6, he caught his first snake at his Uncle Phil’s house in Woodbridge Connecticut.  Phil, was a huge influence on Kenny’s life, adding to it a knowledge of horticulture par excellence, as Phil was an avid gardener along with his wife Molla (alive as of this writing at 102).  Kenny’s home life was eclectic to say the least, but stabilized by a part time nanny who was half native American and half African American from the deep South.  This woman supported Kenny in outdoor wildlife activities, and taught him how to catch frog with empty stainless steel pots.  Later, the trapping would evolve into blue jay snares, squirrel triggered door traps, and bird nest pilfering poles.  Amazingly, many of the animals were never hurt, and most were raised and eventually released- or delivered to a pretty good nature center on one of New Haven’s little mountains- West Rock.  By 12 years old, Kenny was working several days a week in a local pet shop, where like many a pet shop rat- he basically grew up.  First real exotic pet, an orange chinned parrot, was his first pay check.  Later, he raised various monkeys and other exotic mammals at the shop (all legal at the time), and also cared for the crates of reptile arriving from Bangcock and Africa.  At 13, he bred a rare labyrinth fish which may have been the first U.S. breeding of this species.  At 15, he housed and raised baby Jackson Chameleons, true chameleons from Africa, and some of the first to arrive in the U.S. pet trade.  Later, NaturalstGuy would be present when that very pet shop burned to the ground on a Sunday morning killing most of the wildlife inside (along with pure bred dogs).  In high school in New Haven, while sowing a wild oat or 40, Kenny was enrolled in an Animal Technology course which was odd for an inner city and heavily integrated school.  His project, albino skunks and tumbler pigeons (pigeons with a defect of the inner ear that makes them spin during flight).  College led him the University of Miami in Florida, where after two years of fun in the sun studying biology, anthropology and art (and sowing 50 more wild oats) he returned to finish his Bachelor of Science in Wildlife/Botany at Southern Connecticut State University.  From there, he did a stint as the electron microscopist for the Neuropatholgy unit at Yale University’s School of Medicine before moving to help open, as a greenhouse manager, a horticulture store and diagnostic lab in a neighboring town with a friend from college.  Soon, the company merged with a larger national chain, and Naturalistguy was moved by truck with all his belongings to Detroit, Michigan.  Unsettled in the Midwest which appeared 10 years behind to the east coast nature nut, Kenny eventually left with his future wife to return to the East, but this time in Saratoga County, N.Y.  Her, Kenny developed an indoor plant maintenance business with his wife, and also worked full time as a field technician studying salamanders at the Edmund Huyck Nature Preserve in Albany County.  Christmas 1994 led him to his first career move, when he took a job in Stony Brook, N.Y. as a Pesticide Control Specialist for the State of New York’s, Department of Environmental Conservation.  Time continued to happen (funny how that is!), and today he has morphed into a what he likes to consider one heck of a nature geek, with a passion for education, protection of the environment, and constant learning.  Be it a new beetle, a new plant, a new microorganism, usually this will lead to a segue that could last a month- or in the case of his research with colleagues on the infra-sound production of true chameleons, into a 15 year search for answers.  Lately, he’s been busy with understanding the life of the eastern hognose snake, Heterodon platyrhinos, which as he puts it “. . .has 100 built in PhD’s all ready to go.”  When asked what he does, he usually will reply, “I’m just a naturalist, I like it all.  Even humans are a bit interesting.”  Father to Celia Rose, who as of this writing is five years old, CC as she likes to be called has followed suit with a passion for science and nature.

What:
Straight out, NaturalistGuy (NG) is a a bit of Natural history, expressed randomly, for all ages, and all levels.  A bit of everything for everyone.  NG will share things in our natural world that general naturalists, nature geeks, birders, herpers, entomologists of all levels, and even pangolin people   might find interesting.  But you don’t have to be immersed in nature to love NaturalistGuy.com.  Its multi-level information, the ad-hoc approach, its randomness, and the photography that will accompany the posts will hopefully give the reader a sense of wonder.  The same instantaneous sense of  awe that NG feels every day.  So, at one level we have Kenny’s random encounters, but at the same time we have nature as nature occurs- as it really is.  Of course, the relationships are not dismissed, and science has categorized nature to where it is almost over done at times.  However, NG will ride along on the random and magical (if you’d like mystical) and all its patterns, where plants and animals alike seem to say “Here we are, give us a closer look, we travel with you on the same planet, and our destiny and our daily fates and needs are very similar.  We are with you, and though at times both of us may be against each other, under the word NATURE, we share the same gift.  The momentary and sometimes fleeting gift of life.  WELCOME to NaturalistGuy.com!

The NaturalistGuy Team

Contact: naturalistguy@naturalistguy.com