I started out as a bird-watching mathematician, and slowly realized that the best of modern pure mathematicians are also naturalists, but ones who want to make sense of the mysterious and beautiful world of mathematics. For me, the challenge of making sense of the mysterious and beautiful world of ecology, and lately more and more of molecular and cell biology, confronts the logical elegance of mathematics with endlessly wonderful and new biology. The American Naturalist is for me the journal that best captures that spirit as the place where creative observation and synthesis, being naturalists in the broadest sense, has a home.