A Passion for Birds

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snow geese are maybe the most exciting bird in North America for me. Growing up in North Dakota, the sight of snow geese was really the major symbol, especially of spring. And for me, being there to see those snow geese in the spring was really the most important thing in my life. It was more important than Christmas or the start of vacation. I spent a lot of time just watching them and photographing them, and I'd be knee deep in cold water and trying to protect the camera. And by the end of the day, I would just be mud from head to toe practically. I drive home in a kind of a days, and at night I wouldn't be able to go to sleep. I'd close my eyes and there'd be snow geese coming across the sky. That really represented a kind of a personal epiphany for me, seeing gods that really existed and that I could almost touch. With Paul, yes it is an obsession,

yes it is. I think it's an obsession since childhood, and that's really when you should become obsessed with something to really become truly good. I think when you look at his whole body of work, it's simply astounding. And even though we know him from his art and we know him from a few of his popular books, the big bulk of it is good, solid, ornithological work and synthesis. I've never seen him angry, and all you have to do is mention a bird and he's got a smile on his face. OK, what had been regarded as two species become one, and so one of those two species is the regular and cedar point in Western Nebraska. And here, where he comes almost every year, his University of Nebraska professor Paul John Skart, award -winning author and world's foremost authority on waterfowl. They're killed here flying over the water coming this way and a lot of cliff swallows. Teaching has always been

important to me, I've always regarded myself, I suppose, more as a teacher than anything. At cedar point, we're out on the field virtually every day. We are doing the kind of ornithology I like, which is field ornithology. And there's a whole sense of belonging. Plastic or American, I think. Everybody belonging to an extended family sort of thing. Look, we got a red tailed hawk nest, but there are at least, well, there's at least one pair of kingbirds in this tree, in the same tree with a hawk. It's much more oriented to doing things in nature. And so everybody gets much more involved. And I suppose my feeling about birds, about nature, comes across much more strongly out there because we're more intimately associated with it. We're getting into some birds that are really characteristic of forests, these tall cotton lids, support things like warbling veria, which we just heard in chickadee, which has been singing right up here,

and the red tail hawk. Those are birds really one of the most important things about teaching is never to either insult the intelligent of a student or to insult the student. You really have to treat them with substantial respect. I hope it also includes a sense of the sanctity of nature. Take a look at this. It's clearly stupid, I suppose, to worship nature, but at the same time there's a lot that's worshipful about nature that is so beautiful and so interesting, but it's hard to imagine people not to be fascinated by it. The last passenger pigeon died in captivity in about 1913 or 1914 by Dan Cirtney who's gone from wild. Do you think there's any out there somewhere? The passenger pigeon, not a chance. It's calling out.

He puts everything into his work. He sees something and he can see a bird across the lake and he knows what it is and it's so much a part of him. The eye is set back under this overhanging bridge. In all of my courses one of the underlying themes is evolution and that probably goes contrary to the ideas of many of the students, especially in a freshman course. So you have to approach that with a fair amount of care as to how you discuss evolution and not to force it down their throat, but at the same time I feel my job is to provide it if you will, a convincing case for evolution because to me that's what biology is all about. The eyes of birds are extremely large relative to body size, probably larger. I guess I think of myself as a teacher in the broadest sense, using

an array not only formal teaching but writing and drawing of photography, all those things as a way of transmitting information. The seeds of John's Guards Distinguished Career were planted in a small North Dakota town in the early 1930s. Born the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, John's Guards budding interest in nature is reflected in his childhood artwork. My mother is one of those people who saved almost everything I ever did. She saved a number of my early drawings that probably date from either first grade or possibly before. Although I started watching birds about the time I began school, I didn't imagine that one could study birds for a profession. As John's Guards sketches matured, so did his professional ambitions.

He obtained his PhD in Ornithology at Cornell in 1959 and decided on a life project no one else had attempted to study all 145 of the world's species of waterfowl. Major travel awards from the National Science, Health and Guggenheim foundations enabled him to travel over the world, studying birds in Australia, England, South America, Canada and Africa. And from those studies emerged another goal. He would write 25 books in 25 years. John's Guards achieved both ambitions, communicating his passion through art and science. And I've continued to sketch throughout my life and it became especially valuable once I started writing books because I didn't have to hire somebody to do my illustrations. I rarely am dependent upon somebody else. I

can do my own photography, I can do my own illustrations, draw my own maps, plus write the text. You're high, Jim. I have the color proofs for the quail book. They just arrived. They look wonderful. The contributions, indeed, the technical books I write, the monographs are really my serious contribution. They're the heaviest writing I do, the books, the volumes are the biggest. They take much the most time. And so those are the ones that I suppose will receive the most use, at least by biologists. But in a way, I also write for other people and those books sell larger numbers of copies and are, I suppose, read with more enjoyment. I had written a technical book on the Cranes of the World and although that was a satisfying book, I still felt the average person wasn't about to read that book and I really wanted something that anybody could read and learn about cranes. For our unborn children, may they too have

cranes. Wildlife is one of the legacies we leave our children and cranes are a very special kind of wildlife. They have that aura of mystery and wonder. I think they dance simply because they're excited. I think anything, whether they're slightly frightened or sexually excited or they simply don't know what else to do, they'll start dancing. So it happens a lot more often than you'd expect. And they have that sort of humanoid appearance, long legs, they stalk about cornfields and so on, you know, very humanoid way to this part of their attraction. When you look at a crane, you know it's looking back at you and somehow assessing what's going on. And there's incredible calls that carry great distance and they just really

penetrate to the merit of your bones. The plant is just about a unique river, not only for Nebraska, but the whole continent. It's wide and it's shallow and it's got a lot of sand bars and it's got corn on both sides of it for 75 or 100 miles and it's that combination of things that makes the plant so attractive to cranes, indeed absolutely unique. So when the cranes come, they can spend five weeks here feeding to their hearts content and during that time then they gain probably 20, 25 % additional body weight and form fat and really go into the next phase of their spring migration in absolutely perfect condition. Tom Mangelson is a respected wildlife photographer. He is also one of John's Guards' former students. We just matched Tom Mangelson and I. It seems

as if we've been friends since as long as I've known him. He loved birds. He especially loved waterpiles and in a way he was, I suppose, a lot like me. So we started going out to his cabin on the plant the very first year I met him and I don't know if we've ever missed a year. He's willing to put up with some of the inconveniences being wet and cold and frequently a little to eat or whatever and still be bright and enthusiastic and willing to do anything. Tom and I, with our regular failures in trying to attract sandhill cranes to a set of decoys or whatever, that's almost something we look forward to see how badly we can fail this year. 20 years in the old pool. This is the year, right? I guess some of these cranes remember us from the first year. There's dummies again. It's like coming home, I suppose, for

me to get back to the plant. You are almost never out of the side of cranes. It's the biggest concentration of sandhill cranes, not only in North America, but it's maybe the biggest concentration of cranes anywhere in the world. People ask me what's the neatest thing I've seen and I say, well, you've been to Africa and you've been to Australia and say, well, a lot of rivers probably at least as good as most places in Africa. You know, Tom, it almost looks like they're having fun up there, sorry, but they spend so much time at it that they really must be some purpose. I think it's because I think the adults are showing the chicks were to migrate from that altitude. They could recognize this area when they reach it next year. You know what we should do? I think we should put condos all up and down the river here and then some maybe a shopping center and then send the money to the government and lower the deficit or something like that. I think anybody

would buy condos all over. Well, I think they've already started practically. There is a strong streak of satire in many of the ways that I look at the world. But it's a good natured kind of thing, I think. It's not very ill and it's simply a kind of a slightly lighthearted, but still I hope an effective way of pricking balloons that I see being erected around the world and around the country. The little book Dragons and Unicorns came along in the first year to the Reagan administration and I was deeply depressed over the future of democracy as I saw it with the Reagan crew. And I really felt I had to do something to respond in some way. For those who still look for cloven hoof prints and mountain meadows and for smoke clouds rising from the mouths of caves. Well, the story is I remember it. Father was just coming home from a trip to Minnesota

and it's a long drive and very boring. And when he got home he told me that on the way home he had come up with this idea for a book he wanted to do with me. And the basic premise was the animals know for God. That is the animals that didn't get on the ark and so perished in the flood. That whole book is largely metaphorical and satirical and of course politics and religion are a substantial part. If indeed there is a heaven anywhere, one can only hope that its gates are wide enough to accommodate the largest of all dragons and its horizons sufficiently remote to allow the shyest unicorn to graze in peace forever. Any heaven that has room only for those who subscribe to a rigid and limited set of beliefs is a fit place for those souls who deserve a very special kind of health. The dragon appears in so many different cultures in one form

or another and likewise with the unicorn, although two is somewhat lesser extent. And I in a sense sort of identified myself with the dragons and knew Karen was crazy about unicorns so that seemed to be clearly the way that we should sort of divide the work. Similarly with the drawings either she would do a sketch and I modified her I would do a sketch and she modified. And so we come up with in a sense kind of hybrid drawings and her style was quite different from mine. I took pure responsibility for things like skeletons and fossil dragons and unicorns and those sorts of semi -technical kinds of things. I never studied biology in school, never at all, not even basic biology. That's why I never draw birds you know. I managed to get around that by my interest in fantasy. No one can say that you're wrong when you draw a picture of something that cannot be. That you make that up yourself. If we are to learn anything from the dragons

and unicorns, perhaps it is that animals should not be judged by human values. That is, by whether or not they are useful to us or whether or not they conform to our own ideas of beauty. There is a place for unicorns in this world, just as there is a place for dragons. And if we do not allow both these creatures to survive and prosper in some form, we can hold out little hope for our own survival. This little guy was found about a week ago in an abandoned farmhouse, somewhere in Iowa. And people thought at first that the bird was sick. I think he was just torpored when it was cool. They went to pick him up and he flapped just wrong and they heard the legs snap. So they took him to a veterinarian and found out that both legs were broken. So they sit in this way and after much trial and error, I think we finally hit upon a couple of good solutions. He has popsicle sticks on one leg and a wire brace on the other one. Betsy Hancock

is the director of the Raptor Recovery Center. Injured Raptors, hawks, owls, eagles, vultures are sent to her for treatment and, if cured, released again into the wild. Birds are often a symbol of impending danger. If a bird species starts disappearing, particularly things like, say, bald eagles and ospreys and paragrants earlier on during the high point of the DDT era. Pretty much oiled all over. They provide us with an indication of what's happening in our world, sometimes before more sophisticated kinds of measurements become apparent. If species start disappearing, we have to start thinking, now why are they disappearing? Is it indeed some kind of a poisoning environment or is something else happening that we're not so aware of? We had a horn doll one time that got into a vat of molasses. In the farmer that found it, set it out in the field to dry. It's stiffened up.

Presumably, they couldn't care less about humans. If anybody is to understand anybody, it's more important for us to understand them than they are. I often think I spent the first 30 years of my life trying to become a scientist in the next, say, 20 or 25 years of my life trying to become a humanist and an artist. Almost antagonistic in a way. The song of the North Wind, the snow goose book, was really my first serious effort at breaking that initial mold. The whole thing was written with a sense of almost urgency to get out all of these feelings that had gradually built up in me over the years about the values of the East. And trying to put it in the context of what might happen to a family of snow geese in the course of the year. The name of the snow goose gives you an idea of where it comes from. The original name was

Chen Hyperbrio, which means the goose from the out of the North Wind. They nest in very remote areas in a high Arctic, and that means they have to migrate several thousand miles probably on average. Wildlife Refugees like Squawk Creek are a part of a national system, mostly federally funded sanctuaries. Usually arrive on the south wind, clear day, and soon simply start funneling almost like gigantic snowflakes dropping in the marsh. This is the first time I've ever seen a snow goose.

Anything will step them off, a fog flying overhead, or the slightest sound and one bird will shout an alarm call, and then the whole flock will suddenly rise. In recent years, there's been substantial pressure on the part of sportsmen's groups to utilize those refuges in varying ways for hunting. But I think anything but sporting to simply stand in a ditch and shoot at everything that flies over if it's inside. It's sort of the last step in a series of degradations of what I think was originally a fairly honorable sport, namely duck hunting.

And I had some rather emotional things to say about that kind of hunting in my book on the snow goose. I hope that one can appreciate the value of geese not just as hunted objects, something to shoot, but as products of evolution that are in themselves interesting and are worth preserving. I did hunt mainly because my dad hunted a lot, and my older brother hunted, and so it was almost family tradition to hunt. I don't really regret those days, although I never really enjoyed killing birds. I enjoyed being out and seeing things, and finally it got to the point where I really couldn't easily kill birds. I just took the camera instead. Normally what I do is drive over pretty much toward this side of the road, in spite of the fact that

it's the wrong side of the road. I guess I'll go down the middle, but if I see something, I tend to park over on the left -hand side. Some of the things I remember most vividly from childhood is we'd go on these family trips together. We'd be driving along this little ribbon of a road, right? There'd be a mountain on one side and a big ravine on the other, and he'd suddenly see a bird, you know, and he'd be trying to drive with his elbows or something so he can try and get a picture of this bird, or point it out to us or something, and we'd all be going, we're going to die. But on the other hand, I've never had an accident when I'm driving, other than going off the road occasionally, that sort of thing. He's sort of the absent -minded professor, one thing he is not, and that is a good driver, and I would always try to drive. Well, he's gone off the road a few times, too, or at least been stuck. You see the little black spots on the very back, there's a pair of round

black spots around the back. Some people think those are like little eyes, and they keep bigger hawks from coming down behind it and grabbing it. John Scard's personal eagerness to observe birds is underscored by his desire to spark that passion and others. He writes four and talks to all scientists, the general public, and children. He's looking really fly away. It was this ability to integrate his scientific and artistic skills that won him a special award in 1987. The award, established in the name of artist and scientist Lauren Isley, honors, an individual whose aesthetic and humanistic interests are as much a part of his greatness as the technical skills which have brought him renowned. John Scard worked non -stop for most of his life until the day he was forced to slow down. Well, my heart attack came totally unexpectedly. I had no indication whatsoever

up until that time that I had any heart problems. It was a cold morning in November. And very fortunately, Sally Gaines, the graduate student that I had at that time, was already there. You know, I just kept thinking, you know, this is a finest man, one of the finest people I've ever known. And, you know, it's up to me right now to see that, you know, whatever's happening to him is taking care of. And it was a real panic situation. But fortunately, he's so strong and so full of life. Right after I got out of the hospital from my heart attack, I decided to celebrate that particular survival and carve a full -sized blank swan. I guess I liked that swan maybe the best of my carving simply because it represented for me the renewal of life. I've carved probably over a hundred carvings, most of which are life -size, the majority of which all the

early ones were decoys. I really wouldn't change my life in any way. It's basically the life I always wanted to leave. I don't know anybody who's really been more fortunate in being able to lay out a life the way everyone wants to leave it and do just that. I've often thought that I'm addicted to birds and I have a compulsion for writing. So I am a kind of a spokesman, I guess, in a sense a spokesman for birds, a spokesman for ecology and the broadest sense, and a spokesman for understanding and appreciating nature. But there's a degree of ego to be sure. It's nice to be

recognized, know that your books are being sold around the world and translated. That's nice. People often compare me with a crane or a heron because I am long -legged and I move fairly rapidly and I'm reasonably a semi -alert, I guess. Maybe a bit like a bit or something that hides in the grass and doesn't miss much watching from the sidelines and observing the world and not being too conspicuous, hopefully. I think it's really nice to be able to do that. Partial funding for A Passion for Birds was

provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Central Educational Network. Thank you.

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