As the Speaker Series guest was introduced, Ed Newcomb, a member of the board of directors at Lehigh Gap Nature Center, Slatington, said people will long remember Jim Brett.

Center Director Dan Kunkle said he often took students on field trips to Hawk Mountain and Brett was an inspiration to many.

Brett was awarded the title curator emeritus upon his retirement after 25 years with the sanctuary, 15 of them as curator.

Brett told the group gathered at the Nature Center Nov. 13 he was in seventh grade when educator Sam Gundy formed a natural history club.

His work at Hawk Mountain was an outgrowth of the interest in nature fostered at the club and by parents who let him go where he wanted, including a trip with his father to Princeton where he met Albert Einstein.

Brett said he was bored as they talked about physics.

After the visit, they lived through a hurricane on the coast by hanging onto poles.

But there is another side of Jim Brett. In 1980, he went to Africa to work in the field of conservation.

Primates became one of his favorite animals to visit, he explained. While watching some Mountain Gorillas with his then 12-year-old son, the boy put his arms around a gorilla.

A chimpanzee chucked a piece of wood at Brett and hit him on the shoulder.

He also told the story of going to the Smithsonian to study models of early man made from what bones were found.

There was a male and female couple created from a skull found at Olduvai Gorge, one of the most important paleoanthropological sites in the world.

Brett said there is no way of knowing if a man and woman would have traveled in such close proximity but it was a good way to display them.

In Botswana, the Bushmen live lives unchanged over many years.

Brett, who escorts groups to Botswana to hunt with the Bushmen, said a baboon was killed and its skull was cooked.

He did not want a second taste.

Brett showed pictures of the adults sitting around a campfire telling stories to the children.

He said they are the most peaceable people he knows. An aged adult may be somewhere between 35 and 50.

The Bushmen start their day with a smoke of tobacco or marijuana.

He showed a picture of youths coughing and gagging on marijuana because they fill their lungs so deeply. Then, suddenly they relax.

They work sisal with their feet to separate the fibers to make rope.

In 2007, he visited Lake Natron in Tanzania to study the lesser flamingos, a threatened species. They come to the lake to feed on plankton during their migration.

"You have to protect the flamingos," Brett said.

It was at that time, Brett found the oldest Homo sapien footprints in Africa, made in soft lava some 120,000 years ago. He convinced the government to stop mining soda ash in the area to protect them.

"The footprints made me so happy."

The footprints were in the area near the flamingos. He had Masai kids remove the overburden and hundreds of the footprints were found.

Brett recently has been working on creating migratory corridors for elephants between Tanzania and Mozambique.