by Alison Mitchell, Executive Director, New Jersey Conservation Foundation
The daughter of a vegetable farmer in upstate New York, Joanna Burger grew up observing killdeer nests and helping her father around the farm. When she got to high school, she found herself bored, which often led to trouble.
“I was always being brought back by the police,” Burger says, sitting on a folding chair in the New Jersey Pine Barrens on a recent early spring day.
Burger is performing myriad scientific analyses on a snake species that she has looked after for the past 40 years. It is the longest-running study on snakes ever! Without her, this particular population of Northern pine snakes in the Pine Barrens may very well have declined significantly in the region.
She is one of New Jersey’’ leading behavioral ecologists and researchers. At 84 years old, she is still teaching at Rutgers University and leading major studies on gulls, terns, and red knots (a federally threatened shorebird), snakes, and other fascinating parts of the natural world. “Always in collaboration,” she says, “with other scientists and the public.”
For Women’s History Month, we are honoring Burger – and women around the globe – whose lives have made a lasting, positive impact on our natural world. Burger’s legacy touches thousands of people, animals, and plants. She is a world-renowned author with more than two dozen successful books, including “Whispering in the Pines” and “A Naturalist Along the Jersey Shore.” Both works describe her unique experiences as a naturalist-ecologist and the magical worlds she encounters in the wild.
She continues to mentor New Jersey’s leading scientists in Ph.D. programs and in the community. Burger also helped create the first endangered and nongame species council in this state we’re in back in the mid-1970s – a body that continues to conserve New Jersey’s biodiversity to this day. She served on the council for well over 40 years.
But in the mid-to-late ’50s, when Burger was a teenager, it wasn’t typical for a farmer’s daughter to go to college and her family didn’t even entertain the idea. “My parents didn’t believe girls should go to college,” she says.
During high school, Burger was constantly pushed to learn office skills and bookkeeping, but in her senior year, her fascination with birds enticed her to take a biology class. Despite discouragement from her guidance counselors, she enrolled in the class – and thrived. Two months in, the school principal joined the class one day to observe. Suddenly, her biology teacher mysteriously lost her voice and asked Burger to student-teach the class.
So Burger got up and taught her classmates genetics. Later that day, the principal came on over the loudspeaker. “Joanna Burger to the principal’s office, now!” In trouble again, she thought. Except this time, when she got to the office, her biology teacher was there. The trajectory of her life was about to change.
“It was all a big setup!” says Burger. The principal and teacher convinced her to stop secretarial courses and go to college. They kept her after school every day for the rest of the year to prepare her for higher education. It was past the application deadline, but they pulled strings at the State University of New York at Albany and she was accepted.
Today, here in the unique ecosystem of the Pine Barrens, Burger is in charge at this field study event, working with state officials, nonprofits, scientists, students, and the public. She scans the area then looks down as she stirs a small glass Tupperware container of baked beans, three out of five fingers on each hand adorned with turquoise rings of some sort. “Collaboration is really where it’s at,” she says as she names the different groups. “Scientists have to involve the public, and do a better job of explaining and showing what they do for everyday people.”
That is what Burger has always considered herself, after all: an everyday person. The daughter of a farmer. Someone who understands being discriminated against. Someone who worked incredibly hard to get to where she is now. Often, in fact, harder than some of her cohorts, she says.
When Burger applied for a full time teaching position at an upstate New York university after receiving her master’s, she lost the opportunity to a less qualified man because, she was told, “he had a family and she did not.” She says that’s when she knew she needed a Ph.D. “I saw the writing on the wall. I was determined and I knew that, as a woman, I was going to have to be twice as good as any man. Fortunately, I have my father’s energy.”
Burger went on to obtain a Ph.D., studying Franklin’s gulls, and making incredible breakthroughs around New Jersey, including the discovery of red knots in the Delaware Bay in the early 1980s. She notes that our state has become more congested over the years, but she has hopes that people are inherently good and that we can coexist with nature. Her advice to females in the environmental field – never give up. “Work harder than everyone else, love what you do, and give others the chances you had.”
Another scientist approaches and tells Burger that they have opened the next site. She shoots up out of her chair, someone hands her a clipboard, and she disappears into the woods.
To learn more about Joanna Burger and her inspiring work, please visit https://cbn.rutgers.edu/joanna-burger-home
To learn about preserving New Jersey’s land and natural resources, visit the New Jersey Conservation Foundation website at www.njconservation.org or contact me at info@njconservation.org
