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Article Excerpt
What was it like to collect birds and to conduct fieldwork in Mexico in the "early days"? For me it began not at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, half a century ago, when I lost a ping pong game to Ernest P. "Buck" Edwards and won a trip to the tropics, to tropical Mexico, a dream come true. Instead, it began from the experience of growing up with parents who knew and loved farms and the rural-suburban interface. Their experience and the insight about ecology one gains from living on a farm, even one close to a major metropolitan center, is a gift from the gods.
A great deal happened before that ping pong game. Without numerous outdoor experiences and adventures, including field trips with the West Chester Bird Club members or on my own, and especially with summertime farmwork, I might well have ended up enmeshed in some more conventional career or profession. I might never have played ping pong on the top floor of a building housing ecologists before the word had gained much currency. I might not have applied for admission to Cornell, or been accepted, if I were not already an ornithologist on the launching pad, deeply interested in birds, their distribution, habits, and habitats, which is to say, their ecology.
"Ecology" as a discipline had not yet replaced "natural history," which would soon become pass& Nevertheless, it is a serious error to discount natural history and natural historians. A society increasingly urbanized and given to congratulating itself for its street smarts and political sophistications misses the rich outdoor experiences of great value to ecology and would-be ecologists. Yes, field observations seem banal. Their net worth is lost in a cloud of urban sophistications.
I had the stupendous advantage (although I certainly did not reflect on or appreciate this when growing up) of being an only child of farm-raised, college-educated, middle-aged parents. That really helped. Both were anabaptists and not inordinately religious. The latter helped tremendously
Francis Earl (F. Earl) Martin, my dad, was a non-practicing Quaker; my mother, born Daisy Schultz Schultz, was Pennsylvania Dutch ("Deutsch" in German) and a Schwenkfelder. This small reformation splinter group was named for Casper Schwenkfeld von Ossig, who believed the reformation should excise baptism, contrary to the view of the Lutherans, who embraced baptism. Schwenkfeld wrote extensively on his beliefs, writings that my Aunt Salina Gerhard translated and helped to publish. William Penn encouraged Anabaptist immigrants, and many came to Pennsylvania.
In the absence of any congregation of Schwenkfelders in or near to West Chester, where we lived in Chester County outside Philadelphia, I attended a Presbyterian service and Sunday school, joining church at age twelve. Then I promptly quit, leaving traditional religion for good at age thirteen, having realized that a Sunday spent out of doors was much more illuminating than one in the confines of a church and its services.
Both my parents and most of their relatives--minus Daisy's oldest brother, Eugene, a USDA geneticist working summers on potato blight in Aroostook County, Maine, and winters at Beltsville, Maryland--were rock-ribbed Abe Lincoln Republicans. Uncle Eugene was an FDR Democrat. In 1932 when she went to vote my mother took me along. When we left the polling booth, the monitor responsible for the voting process looked down and asked me, "Well, young man, who did you vote for?"
I loudly replied, "Hoover!"
Both my parents had grown up on farms. As a result they were very much at home in the out of doors. They knew the wildlife and the interesting habitats in southeastern Pennsylvania. After World War II, building booms irrupted in the suburbs around Philadelphia to overrun the Pennsylvania Piedmont. Sunday drives that we launched after church often included picnics when the weather permitted. The Sunday drive was special. On occasion we found gypsies camped near one of the piedmont streams where we picnicked, or gathered watercress while I turned over shallow stones in the streambed in search of crawfish.
By the age of fourteen I was a serious birdwatcher. I patrolled my neighborhood and wandered farther afield to adjacent farms, creeks, and woodlots, armed with a used pair of 9x binoculars on loan (and never returned) from a kindly neighbor. With Roger Tory Peterson's new field guide to birds, I began a life list. I joined the West Chester Bird Club, participated in their Christmas bird count and, later, participated with the DVOC's (Delaware Valley Ornithological Club's) Christmas count on the New Jersey coast at Cape May.
The first time I saw stuffed scientific specimens, the skins of waterbirds, they were being passed around at a meeting in Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Science of the DVOC in preparation for their Christmas bird count. The exercise would help the members sharpen their ability to identify ducks and other waterbirds they might find in the count.
In my last year in high school I teamed up with a returning war veteran, Robert Newman, to carry out a daily census during the spring migration of waterbirds on the West Chester Reservoir. We took turns visiting the reservoir until we had covered most of the season. The results were published as a table in the journal of the DVOC.
But the West Chester Reservoir, like most, was not rich in nutrients (undesirable in drinking water) and therefore not highly productive as a waterbird habitat. In contrast, the Delaware marshes outside Philadelphia, where the Schuylkill joins the Delaware River and they are intercepted by tidewater, attracted large numbers of migrating pintail, teal, and other dabbling ducks. Despite pollution from industries around Chester, Pennsylvania, that was where the greatest number of dabbling ducks would be seen in migration.
I may have added one new bird to the Chester County bird list assembled by Albert Conway who, with Roger Whitworth, introduced me to the West Chester Reservoir. They had a key to the southwest gate, deposited for use of members of the West Chester Bird Club by the Borough of West Chester. Club members could enter and identify birds; the ducks were easy to approach closely through a fringe of planted conifers on the south side of the reservoir.
A classmate, Marple Lewis, also interested in birds, helped me in the search for other ways to enter the reservoir in order to spare us the trouble of having to borrow and return the key whenever we wanted to sneak up on the ducks screened by the conifers. To circumvent the locked gate we climbed over it or wiggled under the fence where runoff from erosion had left a natural crawl space or walked to the northwest arm of the reservoir where there was no fence.
Most reservoirs have clear water; they are relatively poor in nutrients and therefore poor in plankton, which means scant food for ducks. West Chester's was no exception. Nevertheless in season we found various grebes, coots, dabbling ducks, diving ducks, Canada geese, and on occasion, a few gulls. Various herons and often a kingfisher haunted the shallows on the northwest corner, attracted to minnows and frogs.
One spring I found three birds flying around the reservoir that I did not recognize. They behaved like terns but were not as white as the common terns I'd seen on the coast. A search in Roger Tory Peterson's field guide, our invariable companion on sorties, indicated that they were black terns in their light winter plumage. At that time black terns were not in Albert Conway's Checklist of the Birds of Chester County. I called him to come see the birds, hoping against hope that they would not have departed. The next day he arrived at the reservoir to verify my observation.
At a farm auction outside West Chester I bought a stuffed red-tall hawk for fifty cents and set it up on a clothes pole in my back yard. It was late spring, the breeding season for many resident birds. I soon discovered what an impact that stuffed hawk with yellow glass eyes made on breeding birds. There were screams of protest from blue jays, cardinals, catbirds, house wrens, robins, and brown thrashers, as well as other resident birds of the neighborhood.
My parents believed strongly in education. Mother had her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and had taught public school in Sussex, New Jersey. My dad had worked for Western Electric until his eyes failed during an emergency following severe flooding at Altoona, Pennsylvania, which ended his ability to install and repair telephone switchboards.
They found each other after my mother returned to the family farm from school teaching in New Jersey, to help her brothers following their parents' death. She served as housekeeper at Scholtop for two of her brothers, who managed the farm together for five years until they got into serious disputes. Dad trained to become a "cow tester," determining butterfat content and bacterial count of milk from dairy herds. Once a month he would spend the night in each of the various farms on his circuit, a social opportunity not lost on eligible members of the opposite sex. Their kin teased the single women about the monthly overnight visit of the bachelor "cow tester."
Dad and Daisy had savings, and they decided that he would study for his doctorate in veterinary medicine at the University of Pennsylvania while Daisy kept house in a cheap rental apartment on Bering Street, near the campus. It was not a slum, but close, and often too noisy for dad to study at night. Hammering on the pipes might briefly quiet the ruckus in the apartment overhead.
Then the stock market crashed, and one of the few securities that weathered the blow and helped to pull us through was the Boyertown Casket Company, stocks that Schultz family members owned. Caskets were the last purchase a penny-pinching family would forgo in the economic squeeze that forced bankruptcies. Boyertown's products kept moving through the crash. As a result the Boyertown Casket Company was one of very few investments that paid dividends to stockholders throughout the Depression. I understood such financial mysteries much better when, at age eight, Santa came with the wildly popular Parker Brothers board game Monopoly.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of outdoor explorations of the Schultz and Martin family farms. The Martins, less prosperous, farmed north of Marshalltown in Chester County, Pennsylvania. My Aunt Nell read Thornton Burgess' outdoor column in the newspaper to me, the stories often referring to "Mother West Wind and all the Little Breezes." She let me go alone on picnics above the farm on a hilltop swept by west winds. At the precocious age of four in Philadelphia I solemnly quoted Burgess to a Bering Street neighbor to the effect that "Mr. Blacksnake is discreet." Our windowsills were laden with soot, something unknown on the windows of farmhouses.
Many of the older farms in Chester County had "springhouses," tiny out buildings in the pastures fed by a trickle of groundwater from the discharge of a small stream or spring. My Uncle Dick had one of these at the foot of the hill where I liked to picnic. Water from the springhouse trickled down into a small room behind the main buildings where perishables were stored before the days of "iceboxes" with ice trucks delivering ice. Refrigeration and freezers were ahead of us.
In my uncle's springhouse I discovered an animal I had not seen before, a large, red salamander with smooth, moist skin. Years later when I learned more about salamanders at Cornell I realized that what I had seen was probably Pseudotriton ruber, a member of the family Plethodontidae with most of its species concentrated in the Appalachian Mountains of the unglaciated eastern USA. I never guessed that I would later find numbers of plethodontids in the caves and tank bromeliads in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Tamaulipas, Mexico, a secondary center of their speciation.
Another youthful adventure is revealed in an old photograph my mother took with her Eastman Kodak. It was summer of 1931 at Scholtop in upper Montgomery County near Palm, Pennsylvania. The view is of a pile of boards next to my uncle's corncrib, where a toddler and a dog tug at a board.
Barney the Airedale growled fiercely, showing sharp white teeth. He pawed furiously at the long boards beside the rat-haunted corncrib. The sides of the crib were covered with wire mesh against the rats. Attracted by spilled corn kernels, the rats lurked in runways beneath boards or any other cover they could find around the crib. Barney and I watched ingrowing impatience as my uncle lifted the boards slowly and deliberately, stacking them into a new pile. Finally, he came to the very last one. A sudden flip of the last board exposed two terrified rats that shot for cover behind the crib. In a flash Barney's jaws snapped shut on one that lost the race.
Barney dropped the limp torso and ran to join my Uncle on the other side of the crib at another stack of boards. I could inspect the relaxed, warm, soft, sleek body, tipped with a spot of blood on its nose. Carefully, I picked it up.
"Paul!" It was MM's (my mother's) voice. I ignored the disapproval in her tone. The killing field and, above all, the lovely limp treasure in mygrasp, with its whiskered, pointed nose, naked tail and feet, beady black eyes, and still-warm body covered with soft sleek fur could not be abandoned. The animal deserved something, a requiem and a burial, with a few more strokes, however brief, to commemorate its last race.
MM pried my fingers loose. "This isn't Puppy Snups," she announced. I knew that well enough. Puppy Snups was a cloth rag doll that shared naps. The rat was limp and warm, and until just a minute ago, had been intensely alive. The rat had it all over Puppy Snups. Hand-in-hand MM marched me back to the house to wash us thoroughly at the pump and to change my clothes. I never learned the fate of my trophy.
As soon as I could after lunch and a restless "nap," I ran straight back to the corncrib kill site, still being patrolled by Barney. We both hoped for more discoveries. We circled the board piles but no rats appeared. Barney sniffed at promising holes and made experimental test digs. There must be more game here somewhere, but we didn't find any.
That snapshot, archived with MM's writing on the back, sharpens my memory: "PAUL AND BARNEY AFTER RATS, July 1931." The other participants are long dead. I am the sole survivor. My memory might be lost too without that snapshot. Now I see it for what it was, a rite of passage. With a grown male (my uncle, one of four brothers) and Barney, a skilled rat-catching Airedale, and my Daisy, my mother, all farm-raised and thoroughly at home outdoors, I had been allowed to join the corncrib rat hunt. Age three is not too early for discovery and a chase, with a capture and a kill by Barney, at the scene of action.
I was no longer an infant or a toddler. I was the right age to begin to delve into the mysteries of the farm, fields, and wooded countryside. The initiation had ended. Down behind the corncrib that day in late summer I earned a valuable new name: Rat Boy.
Three years later, at our new house in West Chester, I found my mother in tears. The mail had arrived. She held a letter from my Uncle Wayne. It was about Barney. The milk truck had run over him and killed him. As was his habit, Barney took offense at the arrival of the big truck backing up to the barn, a routine operation for easy loading of the milk cans. Barney took this as an outrage and attacked the back tires as the milk truck backed under the overhang.
This time the brave Airedale, perhaps feeling his age, misjudged speed and distance and died in battle. Uncle Wayne knew how his sister would feel, but someone had to break the bad news. She cried for more than the loss of her faithful dog.
Dad earned his degree from the University of Pennsylvania and I was at his graduation, the only college or university graduation I have attended, my own included. One is enough. His classmates called him "Pops" since he was the oldest member of the class of 1932, married and with a kid, no less.
As we were in the city, Daisy took me to the zoo, a terrifying experience followed by a nightmare in which lions and tigers filled our tiny backyard; their eyes blazing in the dark, they made fearsome roars. Just possibly such a nightmare is not only the expected outcome of a zoo visit for a youngster but also a leftover from ancient traumas of the Paleolithic that still may linger.
In 1933 Dad started his practice in the Borough of West Chester, the county seat of Chester County. The county had no scarcity of well-established practicing veterinarians to accommodate most of the farms, and Dad saw few clients initially. Fortunately, the husband of one of his sisters operated a slaughterhouse. The connection helped. My dad became their USDA meat inspector. We benefited from gifts of the internal organs of little market value at the time. I soon learned to appreciate sweetbreads, calves' heart, and calves' liver. These minor gifts came in partial repayment for dad's service as a meat inspector. My Dad took me along when he went to Uncle Paul's slaughterhouse on federal meat inspection. I checked out the odorous interior and found one pass by carcasses hanging on hooks over blood and gut piles associated with the butchering was enough. Seeing a dressed carcass hanging from a meat hook with purple inspection stamps from my dad's determinations and clots of blood on the cement floor left a deep impression on me. To a preschool kid a slaughterhouse with carcasses hung from hooks--not to mention the bellowing sounds of terrified animals about to have their throats cut--was unnerving.
One Saturday before I was old enough to join the Boy Scouts, MM and I launched a long walk to the Sharpless estate, a mile or two northeast of our house on the edge of town. The owners had gone broke in the Depression. Now a local bank held their property, with one caretaker in residence. The Sharpless cream separator company was one of numerous victims of the Depression.
Between two small artificial lakes there were deciduous trees, hemlocks, and some pines with (as I later discovered) roosts of long-eared owls. The tip-off was a pellet of rodent hair with mouse bones inside, under the owl roosts. It revealed the roost even if the owl had flown out silently and disappeared without attracting the attention of crows that delighted in mobbing owls in daylight. Lungless (plethodontid) salamanders lived under damp stones near small streams laced with micas in the streambed.
The lakes were popular among swimmers in summer and ice skaters in winter, with a little fishing, although given the nature of the bedrock the lakes were not highly productive. This was within a mile of a huge abandoned mansion made of serpentine rock. Southwest of the property there were serpentine barrens and a quarry face with scattered native scrub pines and abandoned rock quarries. Serpentine was occasionally used as building stone in town, including for a friend's (Bill Heed's) home on the corner of North Church Street and West Virginia Avenue.
Most Sundays after Sunday school and church, which my dad seldom attended, and after Sunday dinner, we left for our Sunday drive, to the Martin family farm just outside Marshalltown, to my Uncle Joel's place east of West Chester and south of the Sharpless estate, or to my Aunt Emma and Uncle Paul's home on the south edge of West Chester. Uncle Paul was a co-owner of the aforementioned slaughterhouse, which provided my dad some employment as a meat inspector. Behind Uncle Paul and Aunt Emma's place were woods with a strange plant that Daisy and Earl knew as Jack-in-the-pulpit, typically the first plant to flower in wet woods early in spring.
After we moved to West Chester and dad started his practice we lived on South High Street near the Teachers College. In the early 1930s drivers commuting to the college parked their Model A Fords or Chevys by the curb with keys left in the ignition. At an early age, five or six, I was allowed to walk around the block on my own. I returned home one day with a splendid collection of keys, removed from auto ignitions where I found them. I must have had keys from at least half a dozen vehicles, mainly belonging to faculty at the West Chester State Teachers College, now a state university. Daisy and Earl took my pilferage matter-of-factly, and I helped Dad return the proper key chains to the proper cars before their owners discovered the theft.
At least I did not have to suffer immediate punishment as an example to younger siblings. Being an only child had undeniable advantages. In the return of the keys I could begin to appreciate the meaning of private property. Monopoly, the new Parker Brothers board game that empowered kids because they might win over grown-ups, also helped. Kids with one or more sibs learned the realities more quickly.
Beyond his problems with the Depression in the 1930s and the oversupply of veterinarians in Chester County, my dad came down with undulant fever, probably caught in his practice. I suspect that Daisy had to dip into her savings to pay our bills until he recovered. A kid my age two doors down from ours invited me into his house. His older brother was fortunate enough to have a job in the Depression and went to work with a lunchbox harboring one edible item, a mustard sandwich. We kids thought that was a special treat.
Later, Dad inspected Texan steers shipped into the Buck and Doe Run farms in western Chester County for "finishing" before being butchered and marketed in Philadelphia. For treating their animals Dad was gifted with some outstanding steaks, never mind meat rationing in World War II. In those years Rocky Mountain spotted fever began to show up in Chester County. Did the western beef animals have something to do with it? Now, Pennsylvania, like many other states, is plagued with Lyme disease, a mysterious and chronic ailment that the medical profession appears unable to treat unless it is diagnosed early in its onset.
SUNDAY'S SCOUT
At age twelve, after near-perfect attendance in Sunday school and a turn or two at playing Joseph in the Christmas pageant, I joined the Westminster Presbyterian Church. The same summer I promptly quit, having decided for myself that Sundays were much better spent out of doors hiking to the Sharpless estate or canoeing on the East Branch of the Brandywine or taking a bus (public transportation was very good before and during World War II) to East Nantmeal in north central Chester County, where I could walk four miles west to "the Marsh." There, along Marsh Creek, a tributary of the Brandywine, there was a chance of finding bitterns or rails and other interesting marsh birds. Years later when I learned pollen analysis from Ed Deevey's lab in Yale's Zoology Department I analyzed fossil samples from the Marsh. Glacial-age mud was close to the surface and harbored a late Pleistocene record of pollen and spores. These findings have been replicated elsewhere in the East, not far from the full glacial ice margin.
At Lenape Park I'd rent a canoe and paddle up the Brandywine with friends. With luck we would see an osprey flying overhead. Once, in tenth grade with the high school band on the Teachers College playing field, I took the overflight of an osprey as a sign to drop band and spend more time scouting for birds along the Brandywine.
With neighborhood pals Bill Heed and Marple Lewis I began trapping muskrats. We discovered that muskrats might inhabit tiny streams, headwater tributaries of the Brandywine, near my home. We sold the skins of the few muskrats we caught for fifty cents each. Others in high school were out trapping, too; one student had the great luck to catch a mink, worth real money from those buying furs in the war. Another high school friend, Fred Otter, who became a research professor at the University of Connecticut later in his career, would return to class after a day's absence smelling faintly but unmistakably of skunk. He would trap skunks, an animal worth more money than muskrats but with a higher price to pay in terms of odor. When Fred's skunk smell was too strong, the teacher would send him home.
One weekend in World War II when I was out looking for spring migrants with my binoculars and inspecting the filled millpond a mile north of my house I heard the rumble of an aircraft apparently with engine trouble, followed by a loud crash. I ran as fast as I could, no mean feat across the marsh and under or over fences of fields to reach the crash site in (ironically) a cemetery. It was a two-motor Martin (no relation) bomber, a B26. The crew had bailed out but they were too low to the ground for their parachutes to function. No one survived. The cemetery was rapidly attracting townspeople to the scene, although I was among the first to arrive. Police and firemen soon herded us out. The next day at school we exhibited aluminum scraps and parts of Plexiglas from the plane. It was a grim reminder of what was happening repeatedly in more active theaters of operation.
At the University of Arizona I learned that a close colleague and friend in my department had attended Hill School, a private boarding school in Pottstown just thirty miles to the north of West Chester. Our paths did not cross until we both became researchers interested in "near time" at the University of Arizona's program in geochronology. C. Vance Haynes was sent to Hill School when his dad served in the Air Force. I thought I'd had my share of adventures in high school with my trap line and field trips in search of rare birds. But those of Vance Haynes in Hill School outside Pottstown were at least an order of magnitude more venturesome. He and some of his classmates slipped out of the school after hours to scout the junkyards outside Philadelphia where scrap was being converted to steel in furnaces. After the war in North Africa scrap was shipped to the Main Line for the manufacture of steel. The Hill School truants found Czechoslovakian machine guns that they pried loose from Italian tanks captured in the North African campaign. These were worth real money in the underground machine gun market.
Bill Heed was a patrol leader in Boy Scouts, and I joined him in the Leni Lenape Troop, named for the Delaware Indians once native to eastern Pennsylvania. We met in the basement of the Friends School in our neighborhood. Before December 7 of 1941 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor someone in a light plane flew over West Chester, dropping leaflets warning us what it might mean if instead of the leaflets he had been bombing us.
Around 1942 returned paratroopers, injured in training or in action, were encouraged to lead "war games" for scout troops. It was late October and the weather was getting cold. We were bussed out to the Sharpless estate, my haunts for ice skating in winter, fishing in summer, and searching for long-eared owls roosting in confers, a welcome addition to the West Chester Bird Club's Christmas count, if the owls could be found.
As a kid I was fascinated with model airplanes, although building an authentic model took too much time to hold my interest. A high point (it is intriguing to realize how moved we boys were by close encounters with military aircraft) was the air show in Philadelphia around 1940, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the airport we saw four Curtis fighters and a B 15, the prototype of the...
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