Drew Lanham grew up on the farm his grandfather built in the 1920s. Lanham, now 54, says his father felt a responsibility to stay on the land and care for the animals and crops planted there. "I saw my father through the land, and I saw the land as my father's heart," he said.
As a kid, he remembers being attracted by the wildlife he would encounter on the short walk between his parents' farm and his grandparents' house. Even though the journey was less than a quarter-mile, he recalled, back then it "seemed like a thousand miles".
Above all, he was captivated（迷住） by the birds."From a very early age, I believed that I would be someone who studied birds-who somehow found a way to fly,"Lanham said. He said he lost track of that dream on the road to becoming an engineer. "Once I left for college, everybody said," You're good at math and science. Be an engineer, Drew,'" he said.
As a student studying engineering at Clemson University, it was a trip to the farm that helped him circle back to his love of birds. "I can remember coming back home, and all of these wonderful forests that I'd grown up in had been cleared away. And losing that land was like losing my father all over again," he said. Lanham's father had died years before.
Though much of their home had been destroyed, some wildlife remained. "I remember when I drove on the dirt road, I heard birds singing. It was the most hopeful thing for me," he said. The bird songs li t a fire under Lanham. After his visit back to the farm, he couldn't see himself returning to work as an engineer. At Clemson he got on track to study to become an ornithologist（鸟类学家）.
"The long hours of work were often hot and hard. But when I looked up, there would be flocks（群） of birds. I realized I was doing what I had always dreamed of,"he said.