Biography Michael Fay - Naturalist

Micheal Fay Photo Mark Christmas

Born in 1956, Michael Fay developed his life-long interest in natural science in California's Sierra Nevada mountains and the Maine woods, where he spent many of his early years. In 1978 Fay graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Science degree before joining the Peace Corps with which he spent 6 years as a botanist in national parks in Tunisia and the savannahs of the Central African Republic. In 1984 he joined the Missouri Botanical Garden under Peter Raven, first to do a floristic study on a mountain range along Sudan's western border, and later beginning a Ph.D. on the western lowland gorilla. It was at this time that Fay first encountered the forests of central Africa which are still the focus of most of his interest. Work on his doctorate had to be curtailed several times (he only completed it in 1997) because of his involvement in surveying large blocks of forest and working to create and manage the Dzanga-Sangha and Nouabale-Ndoki parks in the Central African Republic and Congo. In 1996, while flying a small airplane low over the forests of Congo and Gabon, Fay started thinking about the vast, intact forest corridor spanning these two countries from the Oubangui to the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1997, Fay decided to walk the entire length of this forest corridor, a distance of over 2000 miles, to survey the trees, wildlife and human impact in 12 uninhabited blocks of the forest. The main aim of the project, which Fay called the Megatransect, was to bring these last blocks of central Africa's pristine forest to the world's attention and to highlight their need for protection. Since then, Fay has worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York and also spent two years at the National Geographic Society in Washington writing up the Megatransect and continuing to raise funds for the protection of central African forests.