And, since the science desk here seems perpetually understaffed — 'twas I, the lowly intern — who was tapped for the exciting goose beat. So out I rode with the conservation officials, madly writing down notes from what was only the second interview of my career — watching while the photographer clicked away.

Somehow that little column ended up being a two-page feature story, with a huge graphic splash across the front page of the Saturday Post. And no one but me seemed at all perturbed that a Fellow – or jolly good Fellow, as I'm called around here — had landed a story on page A1.

Rapidly, I despaired of ever living up to my first week of work. While they can't all be as exciting as the goose circuit, I have done some other stories in my tenure so far. I have covered the bees in addition to the birds, with an environment story on mite infestations and the resurgence of feral honeybees. I have covered all manner of ecologically impacted vermin for the Metro front; I have covered technology industry businesses for the Business front; and I have covered St. Louis' erratic and ongoing drought situation in another front-page article. Briefs — business, technology, and otherwise — have been churned out in great quantity. I consider my desk a veritable press-release-covered command center of environment, nature and technology news.

And, finally, last week I had a story spiked — an important journalistic rite of passage, I'm told. The irony of the deceased article is that it was perhaps the first one in my career here that I was actually qualified to cover. Having spent my first couple of weeks here writing about the birds and the bees, it occurred to me that perhaps I should pitch a story about something amenable to both my course of study and my magnanimous friends at the IEEE.

I pitched an article on electronic signatures, had it approved (much to my surprise), did the research (learning that most local companies were caught off-guard by the legislation), and then spent a few days hacking together a nice piece, as well as a sidebar on public-key cryptography. My nefarious scheme to finally make the Sunday feature section was cleverly foiled, however, by an artist who managed to make my fairly simple frontispiece sketch about digital signature into a rather obfuscated piece of art featuring a devil-horned hacker. We elected not to frighten our readers and there wasn't time to fix the graphic.

Still, I appear in the pages of the Post often enough, and am told that my prose approaches readability. I remain dubious about the whole affair, but then — The Editor Is Always Right. Despite all, my team has somehow managed to remain friendly with this gorilla in their midst, and I seem to be accepted as one of them. Perhaps if I were an anthropologist this would be of especial value (I can see a Science Studies thesis on the sociology of sci-journalists). Sadly, the most I can offer my most helpful colleagues in thanks is the occasional twelve column-inch story on the climatology of eastern Missouri.

A couple of my stories have gone to AP — incidentally, a sobering experience. Apparently, AP stories are written by taking feature stories, editing out all the most important bits, and then putting the most confusing 20% on the wire with the original author's name on it. An inverse plagiarism, perhaps, as I feel something's been ascribed to my name that I didn't quite say. But if anyone read an extraordinarily shallow AP wire about nuisance geese in Missouri, I must plead guilt.

The geese, you see, remain my crowning achievement. I pray they never ask for royalties.