ABSTRACT
Inside a small stone workshop on a rocky hillside outside of Tucson, Arizona, surrounded by an exquisite yet forbidding landscape of desert plants, Godfrey Sykes created scientific instruments. An employee of the Carnegie Desert Laboratory, his workshop sat adjacent to the main laboratory building. Both buildings baked in the dusty heat of an Arizona summer. The Desert Lab ecologists sometimes found their arid, remote field sites less hostile to humans than the oppressive heat inside the complex of structures where they lived and worked.
