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crossed the deep curve, the sound was gone. He turned around, went back, and heard it again. He gave some thought to bowfin, but more to catfish. “I know catfish make sounds. They have a bone that they rub against their air bladder. You can take a channel catfish out of water, and he’ll sit there making sounds. I, of course, had brought my trotlines. I baited them with chicken parts, and caught two of the biggest catfish I’d ever seen. That must have been some concentration of fish.” For years, in Grumman canoes, he listened in other places. Nowhere but in that one place has he ever heard the catfish chorus.
    After three years in the Marine Corps, Kynard majored in English at Millsaps College, Jackson, and double-majored in biology. A moment was fast arriving when, as a biologist, he would have to decide between fish and mammals. It was not a long moment. “Fish lend themselves to getting up close and personal,” he says. “I want to be able to understand as closely as I can what’s going on with these guys. Fish—because of their limited sensory ability and limited ability to get away from you—would lend themselves to an up-close-and-personal approach more than, say, a beaver would.”
    His choice was reinforced by eighteen postgraduate months at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. During this period, he married Janice Ray, whom he had met at Millsaps. (Their daughter, Kari, is a journalist. Their son, Brian, is a field technician at the Conte lab.) After Ocean Springs, Kynard went into a master’s program at Mississippi State, where he worked on the behavior of mosquito fish and their physiological resistance to DDT. Somewhere along the line, he came upon a book called “Behavioral Aspects of Ecology,” by Peter Klopfer, found himself reading the whole of it in one night, and decided that behavior was going to be his field. “I was ready to be imprinted.”

    Imprinted and advised. His “major professor,” a herpetologist who happened to come from Oregon, said to him, “Boyd, you’re interested in evolution, and individuals, and behavior. You’re not going to be able to find that in the South. I think you’ve got to get out.”
    Kynard studied journals to see who was doing what on the behavioral ecology of fish. The field seemed to be concentrated in Honolulu, Miami, and Seattle. The School of Fisheries at the University of Washington was the largest and oldest in the United States. Kynard spent five and a half years there, completing a doctoral dissertation on the behavioral ecology of the threespine stickleback. He did his field work in a kayak on a glacial lake in the foothills of the eastern Cascades. He had a microscope, preserving jars, and other lab equipment in the kayak. He had covered the deck with a small platform he could lie on. After observing a fish long enough to note any idiosyncrasies, he would “collect him and collect his nest.”
    Within six years, he was a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where he created the undergraduate fisheries program and developed a strong ambition to establish a desert-fish institute. Arizona was not interested. In 1978, ignoring his tenure, he joined the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and was assigned to a unit in Massachusetts attached to the state university. He had never seen a shad. He was there to work in marine fisheries, but after he saw a shad he transferred into migratory fish. His work on shad and sturgeon has ranged, for the most part, between northern Connecticut and southern Vermont, but has led him in related ways to China, Brazil, Romania, Puerto Rico, and most shad rivers on the two sides of North America. In interior Puerto Rico, where flash floods—“flashy beyond belief”—can turn a stream into frothing “liquid mud,” various fish have developed an ability to go back