Rev. Samuel D. Robbins, Jr. -- past president of WSO, past editor of The Passenger Pigeon, author of Wisconsin Birdlife, and the dean of Wisconsin ornithology -- died at home on 19 February 2000 of complications of diabetes. Sam touched the lives of everyone who met him, read his words, or heard him preach. He will be sorely missed.
The following interview with Sam was first published in The Passenger Pigeon, Vol. 60, No. 1, Spring 1998.
Samuel D. Robbins, Jr. at 75:
An Interview with the Author of Wisconsin Birdlife
by Sumner W. Matteson
In December 1996, at the time of Sam Robbins 75th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a minister, Sumner Matteson visited Sam at his west Madison home, where he resides with his wife Shirley, to discuss his lifelong passion for bird observation and study, as well as his views and beliefs shaped by decades as a small town minister in Wisconsin. Charles Kemper first interviewed Sam in 1978, with the text appearing in the 1982 summer and winter issues (Vol. 44, Nos. 2 and 4) of The Passenger Pigeon. The reader may wish to refer to these issues, as well as past writings (Appendix A) to appreciate fully the life and thought of one of our most distinguished ornithologists.
SM: As you look back on your life, Sam, what were the early experiences that helped shaped your attitudes toward nature?
SR: I think I started to make my first daily bird lists in Belmont, Massachusetts, back in 1932. I was 10 years old, and I did this because I wanted to keep up a bit with my older brother, Chandler, who was doing a little of the same thing. I received lots of encouragement from my parents. Mother and Dad [Rosa Seymour Robbins and Samuel D. Robbins] were naturalists, and they took us out for hikes in the neighborhood. Mother's father was a world famous botanist, Arthur Bliss Seymour, and although my dad was in an entirely different field - speech pathology - he liked his nature hikes, and he took us kids along. I marveled at what he knew and learned a great deal from him. They had no car, so whatever we did was done on foot or by public transportation. Mainly, we hiked around the woodlands and some of the open fields within a mile of our home.
Dad was a very good teacher. He had exceptional ears and a good memory for bird sounds. One little incident I remember occurred on one of our hikes when we came across a bird that sang "Bee-bz-bz-bz." Dad said simply, "Sam, remember that. That's a Golden-winged Warbler." From that moment on, I have recognized that song instantly whenever I've heard it.
Both Chan and I were blessed with unusually good ears. I have had mine tested several times, and people doing the testing say they have rarely seen ears that are as sensitive to high pitches as mine. I feel that this was a very great gift. Along with a better than average memory, my hearing ability has given me a great deal of enjoyment and resulted in an eagerness to learn more and more.
What we had back then was Ralph Hoffman's A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York and Frank Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America. Now those were field guides that predated Peterson's by a long time. They would describe museum specimens, you might say, more than real live birds, but they were the only field guides we had and we used them a great deal.
No such books were available for my Dad, whose interest in birds was going strong as a teenager. I never knew this until I was working on my own book and Walter Scott came across an old manuscript in The Oologist. Walter found that around 1905, Dad wrote an article about an Osprey nest in Maine. He was then a 17-year-old kid. How he learned his birds, I don't know. I do know that he did have a couple of birding companions in those days. Whether one taught the other or whether they were just fellow learners, I don't know.
Many things I learned from my dad, not only about the identification of birds but also about their behavior. In the spring of 1932, which was the first year that I was really seriously keeping bird lists, Dad took my brothers and me up to what we call "Rock Meadow" to listen for woodcocks. It was late enough in March that we figured there should be woodcocks there. Dad knew exactly where to go to find them, and when we got near the area, before we heard any woodcocks, we met up with a fellow who was also out birding. While we were conversing, a woodcock sounded up and this other birder called out, "That's a nighthawk!" Dad corrected him and said, "No, that's a woodcock." And then he went on to explain that the woodcock arrives in late March, while a nighthawk couldn't be expected until May. He said if we listened, we would hear it follow up with its flight song, and that's exactly what happened. This fellow became thoroughly convinced that Dad was right and he was wrong. And here we kids were learning some things about both woodcocks and nighthawks from that experience.
SM: I am fascinated about how your father came to know these birds, especially without anything like the Peterson field guide and without recordings of birds. Is it your belief that he spent a lot of his free time out in the field?
SR: Certainly he spent quite a bit of time in the field. I really don't know how much. As I said, I don't know how much of that time he was alone and how much time he may have spent with friends who had similar interests, but I do think in retrospect that dad had the ears and the memory that it took to learn the sounds that birds make. He passed on to us this importance of listening for these sounds.
He had pet names for certain birds. A White-breasted Nuthatch was "John the Clown Bird" because it would go down the tree trunk head first. A Pileated Woodpecker was "His Royal Highness." He helped us set up a small bird feeder right outside our bedroom window and taught us how to hold seeds in our hands and have the birds feed from them. I think that dad's expertise was pretty much with local birds because I don't think he went on many extended field trips to other places. I think he was competent on water birds, but he didn't go to see them very often.
SM: Tell me about Ludlow Griscom. In the 1978 interview with Kemper, you said that Griscom was one of the first to validate sight records.
SR: Griscom predated Peterson in that regard. He was an ornithologist at Harvard University. I think he taught courses at Harvard, but he was a very active field man. [Griscom was Research Curator of Zoology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1927 to 1948.] Before he came to Harvard, he was in New York City and wrote a book on the birds of the New York City region. He became very well known and recognized as a real pioneer in field identification of birds. Most of the scientific work in those days was done under the assumption that if you had the collected specimen, you had proof of its occurrence; sight identifications were not trusted. Griscom, however, maintained that sight records could be trusted. I think Peterson built very much upon what Griscom did and then developed his field guide on that basis.
In those days, the Massachusetts Audubon Society invited people to send in annual lists at the end of the year, and Chan and I very faithfully did this. Interestingly, the Society's checklist had a column for "seen" and a column for "heard." I don't think I've ever seen that distinction made in any other checklist, but the implication was that a bird that was only heard was kind of a second-rate citizen. People had accepted the idea that you could identify birds by sight, but there was not nearly the acceptance that birds could be identified by ear.
SM: You mentioned in Kemper's article that Owen Gromme told you more than once that when anyone came to the Milwaukee Public Museum with a supposed record of a rare species, the categorical question was: "Where are the feathers?"
SR: I can still hear him say those words. He was quite frustrated by this.
SM: So Griscom was the one who "proved to collectors that you could identify by sight and by sound." How did he actually prove that? How did he change years of tradition?
SR: Griscom did plenty of collecting himself, and I suspect that what he did was to identify birds by sight and sound and then collect the specimens to prove the point. There's a little story about Griscom collecting a bird out in my home town of Belmont. One time, on a Sunday morning, when the discharge of firearms was strictly forbidden, Griscom came across a rarity. I think it was a Blue-winged Warbler. He collected the bird, and he hadn't any more than got the specimen and his gun back in the trunk of his car when a police car drove up. The policeman asked Griscom, "Hey, did you hear a shot around here someplace?" And Griscom's reply was: "I certainly did, officer! It was off in that direction!"
SM: How much importance did you place on exploring the natural world as an adolescent?
SR: Well, it was the bird world more than the natural world. My interest in nature was pretty much restricted. I learned plant life to some extent, and I think I probably learned that from my mother as much as from my father, but I didn't pay near the attention to plant life that I did to bird life.
One time, before I was a teenager, the author Thornton Burgess once had a radio program for a few weeks in which he featured bird songs. Whether he did the whistled imitations of bird songs, or whether somebody else in the studio did them I'm not sure. He ended the series of programs with a contest. He invited his listeners to send him on a postcard the names of 25 birds whose songs he was going to imitate. So he whistled his 25 birds, and my mother, my brothers Chan and Roger, and I, all put down our answers on postcards. When we sent our cards in, we assured Burgess that we had all worked independently, that we were not in cahoots. Burgess was going to award a prize - his own leather-bound Birds You Should Know - to the 25 highest scorers. Our family won 4 copies. I think Chan had every answer right, and the rest of us each missed one. The prize was a nice little book to have, and the way in which we got it was kind of interesting.
I remember my first bird glasses. I still have them here: little 4-power opera glasses; they weren't prism binoculars. There were two pairs, and they were for the entire family. Both of them had the same magnification, but one had a nice wide eyepiece, and the other one didn't; so we always wanted the one with the eyepiece. I don't think we ever fought over these glasses, but we waited impatiently for our chance to use them if we were on a hike and one of us had it and one didn't. Prism binoculars were available in those days, but they were too expensive for our family, and so we got along as best we could. I may have been college age before I bought my own binoculars.
We had no car in our family. My parents weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and Dad's work did not require him to have a car. Public transportation served for going back and forth to his job every day. He had his own private school for stammerers called the Boston Stammerers' Institute. Dad was a real pioneer in the field of speech correction, and he saw that field develop a great deal during his lifetime. Eventually he joined the faculty of Emerson College in Boston, which is a college that specializes in speech. There's a clinic there now that's named in honor of my dad.
Birding was very much a side hobby with him; he was a hiker. Mother and Dad were very faithful, regular church members, so what hiking we did was mainly on Sunday afternoons.
SM: When you were growing up, what was the environment like around Belmont?
SR: Belmont has always been strictly a residential town near Boston. So it's got practically nothing in the way of industry. There were some wealthy landowners who kept substantial areas of woods in their natural state. So we had good woodland birding close by us. Cemeteries were favorite places to see birds. The bigger the cemetery and the bigger the city, the more important a cemetery is because it's an island of greenery in the midst of a concrete jungle. I grew up a couple of miles from the famous Mount Auburn Cemetery that attracted birds the way Central Park in New York has done. This cemetery was one of the most favorite places to go to see warblers in spring. There were also a couple of ponds nearby that we would visit that were good for waterfowl. We didn't have very much in the way of open fields; it was pretty much woodland birding that we did.
SM: Other than your father, who was an early influence, do you remember other people who inspired you?
SR: I remember that we belonged to the Brookline Bird Club, which is a local Boston area club of amateur birders who love to go on field trips together and observe what they see and hear. Nobody was collecting birds. We got rides to take us to some new areas that we weren't able to get to before. I think there were a couple of people in the bird club who were very good at bird identification who taught my brothers and me some things, but mostly I think it was the other way around. My brothers and I had learned enough so that we were teaching the rest of those people quite a bit. But I'm sure they were helpful in getting us going more into birds.
There came a time when we met a man named George Baker Long, who was fairly elderly, widowed, and caring for a handicapped daughter. He had just developed an interest in birds, and he turned out to be a very avid bird lister. Once we got to know him, he would call us and invite us to go different places with him and to bird together. Now I don't think he taught us very much about birding. Again, it might have been the other way around. He showed great mutual respect and admiration for what we knew, and he sure took us to places where we saw things that we would never have had a chance to see. We were very grateful for this.
I never had the chance to hobnob with Griscom the way I wish I could have. There was a Harvard Ornithological Club that Griscom was connected with. Chan, as a student at Harvard, got the benefit of that. I was green with envy with the fact that I was just a little too young to be able to get in to that Club.
I was the youngest of the three boys. Chan is three and a half years older than I, and so we often went out together. I'd say he was a mentor. We got along very well. Roger was interested in birds, but not to the extent that Chan and I were. I think partly this is because Roger was into athletics in school and neither Chan nor I had the athletic gifts, so we spent more time out on bird hikes and began keeping our lists.
SM: So Chan and you went birding regularly. Did that continue for several years?
SR: Right up until the time I left home to go to college because Chan was still living at home most of the time that I was still in high school. Chan went to Harvard, and we lived only four miles from the Harvard campus.
Chan and I used to hike around and listen for any bird sound or see any movement. Chan was the one who taught me the value of "pishing." If we felt there were some birds nearby in some shrubbery, he would get on one side and I'd get on the other and we'd do some pishing. Then we'd call out to each other what we were seeing. We used the same methods, and whether Chan learned them from someone else, I don't remember.
Dad taught us something about how to recognize that birds were present and how to try to approach them without flushing them.
SM: What did he advise?
SR: Just move very slowly. If the bird that you wanted to see was in a tree and there was some shrubbery in between, try to get over by that shrubbery, so your movements would be unobtrusive.
SM: Why did you move to Madison? Why didn't you stay in the East?
SR: Wanderlust, the desire to be out on my own. Madison allowed me to do this in easy stages because during my first two years in college here, I stayed with my mother's sister and her family. I came to Madison in 1939, just about the time The Passenger Pigeon and WSO got going. I missed by just a few months being a charter member.
Local bird clubs had only recently started in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, Racine, and Waukesha. In Madison, we had basically two clubs: The Madison Bird Club that was a forerunner of an Audubon chapter and made up of interested birders, and the Kumlien Bird Club. I don't think The Madison Bird Club involved professional people at all at that particular stage. The more professional scientists all gravitated to the Kumlien Bird Club, which was connected to the university. This had people like [Aldo] Leopold, [A.W.] Schorger, Leon Cole, and a good many other people who were involved in ornithology on a professional level; these were almost entirely university people. But the Kumlien Bird Club members didn't get out in the field very much. They were doing more in the way of research. In terms of just getting out and observing birds and keeping records of when they arrived and departed, very few people were doing this. When I came on the scene, I got the feeling right away that I was more experienced in bird identification.
One of the first things that WSO did in The Passenger Pigeon was to publish field notes. WSO received field notes from only a few people, and when I started putting my field notes into the hopper, my name appeared in some of these field notes reports more than anybody else's, which simply meant that I was a more active field observer than most of the other people here. This eventually changed. The bird clubs became stronger, and eventually we got more local clubs started in different cities, and the interest gradually broadened.
Another development was the Christmas Bird Count. I think there had been a Madison Christmas Bird Count off and on way back in the years before World War I. But nothing steady occurred until WSO got organized and they started publishing Christmas Bird Count results. In the first couple of years, they published about a dozen counts. Then during World War II that number published dropped to maybe only six or seven counts per year. Eventually, when I was asked to become associate editor of The Passenger Pigeon, I thought, "Gee, we ought to do better than this." I made a few contacts in different cities, and pretty soon the number of counts published doubled, tripled, then leveled off for a while. We still weren't getting full statewide coverage. As time passed, I contacted a few more people. The response was beautiful. Now we have 80 or 85 circles (each a 15 mile diameter circle) covered per year.
In those early years of WSO, the ornithological interest was pretty much centered in southeastern Wisconsin. We used to speak about the Racine-Madison-Green Bay triangle. All the bird clubs were in that area. The Racine club was called the Hoy Nature Club.
There were two clubs in Milwaukee. One was called the Milwaukee Bird Club, and I think it was the one that appealed to the more professionally minded people. There was also an active group of birders connected with the City Club. I think that's the only name that I ever associated with it. Members were largely women, and somebody like Mary Donald probably would still know something about that. Ivy Balsom was one of the leaders of that group. Gertrude Nunnemacher was involved in it, but I think that they were simply people who liked to go on field trips together. Probably not the most experienced birders. Dixie Larkin was a prominent person in that group eventually, and Dixie was instrumental in organizing what was called the John Muir Club, which consisted of a bunch of teenage boys. They became some of the most avid birders in the Milwaukee area. Some of these boys have gone on to achieve outstanding success in ornithology. There's Gordon Orians in Oregon, George Treichel in California, Dan Berger, and Helmut Mueller.
I believe the Green Bay Bird Club was started by Earl Wright at the museum at Green Bay. Members helped to organize WSO and hosted one of the first WSO conventions. The Green Bay Club just disbanded within the last year. I was up there in the fall of '97 to speak to a new group that has taken its place.
Eventually, a group got started in Appleton. Nell Rogers was a good strong field birder, and I think she got some people going in a bird club there in Appleton. Daryl Tessen probably would know something about that.
Even as late as 1960, relatively little birding was being done in northern and western Wisconsin except by conservation wardens and some research individuals.
Another thing that illustrates how narrow the interest was can be traced back to the late 1950s when I was asked to be editor of The Passenger Pigeon. I was associate editor from about 1946 or so until the late 1950s when I was asked to serve as editor. I can well remember that when I took over as editor, the barrel was empty. There wasn't a manuscript of any kind for me to use in the first issues. This meant thinking up new ideas and convincing people to do some writing. One of these ideas was to have a series of articles devoted to birding hot spots - some of the prime places to go in Wisconsin to look for birds. So I wrote up the Mazomanie area and a couple of others, and other people did the same. We planned to save these pieces and eventually put them out in book form. In a few years, we had 25 or 30 collected and decided to put them out in book form. But most of them were within the southeast triangle. We had very few spots in the northern half of the state. This was because birders hadn't been there. They didn't know where the hot spots were.
So we put out the first edition of Wisconsin's Favorite Bird Haunts. I think we covered about 30 areas. Thankfully, Daryl Tessen took this project over 15 years later and made a much more complete volume out of it, but that's the difference between 1960 and 1976. We just didn't know much about northern Wisconsin's bird activities.
There were people out in other areas doing some very good work. Wallace Grange was a real fine researcher; he investigated the status of woodland birds in Wood County. There was a fellow up in Sawyer County, near Hayward, named Karl Kahmann, who was quite active in the early years of WSO, but again I don't think he had a bird club there. He was just someone who had an interest in birds, and he managed to keep in touch with people from the triangle. There were scattered individuals like that, but no other clubs that I knew of in those early years.
SM: I wanted to ask you about some of the individuals who were very important in the early years. Let me start with Aldo Leopold. What was your impression of him? Of course, he died in 1948, so did you get a chance to know him?
SR: Yes, I knew him. I met him at Kumlien Club meetings, and we got to know each other reasonably well. It was my regret in retrospect that I never took a course under him. I should have. It didn't fit in with my major interest at that time. He was working with grad students. I think he had already become very well known and had established a very strong reputation. It was during the time that I was here, if not before, that he served on the Wisconsin Conservation Department's Commission that preceded the DNR Board.
I thought the world of Leopold. I was a youngster compared with everybody else he was involved with, but he never treated me as just a little kid. He treated me like an adult before I really was one. I have really warm feelings toward him and much respect.
I don't remember that we did any field work together other than we paid attention to the birds near the shack. At Kumlien Bird Club meetings, members always asked for a recent bird observation by anybody. I don't think Leopold hardly ever contributed to this. I just assumed this was because of his work; he just didn't have time for birding trips, hikes, just for the sake of seeing birds. He was too busy with more important things. I was the guy out in the field a lot. I think, at first, when I reported a few rarities, they were met with a certain amount of questioning. If somebody said that they thought my report was of a very unusual bird and asked how I identified it, I would describe what I had used for identification field marks. People like Walter Scott and Norv Barger came to my aid and helped people accept what I said at face value.
SM: Could you tell me about Walter Scott [1911-1983, administrator with Wisconsin Conservation Dept., first editor of The Passenger Pigeon]? I met him a few times in the mid-1970s and was impressed by his dedication to conservation issues.
SR: Walter Scott was a remarkable bundle of enthusiasm. He seemed to have boundless energy to put into many different causes. He really did have some wide interests, but I remember him also as a very sincere and friendly person. To illustrate the kind of thing that Walter did that isn't done by many other people, if some newspaper clipping pointed out something good that somebody had done, Walter would sit down and write a little note to that person and congratulate them. Now how many people do that? He was just an appreciative and outgoing person.
Walter was instrumental in organizing WSO. He was anxious not only that this organization get started, but also that we'd get started doing a bunch of worthwhile things. It was when I was a sophomore at the university that Walter assembled a team to prepare a preliminary checklist with migration graphs. He included Earl Loyster from the Conservation Department, Norv Barger who had just joined the Department, me, and Elton Buzzewitz, a grad student from Watertown. I thought, "What am I doing on this committee supposedly talking about Wisconsin birds when I'm only in my second year here?" But I think Walter appointed me because he felt that I was such an active birder and that I'd had so much experience with birds in Massachusetts that I had probably had a better grasp of Wisconsin birds than many of the people here. We published the checklist booklet, and now its been through four more revisions.
Buzzewitz was killed during World War II, and Roy Lound worked on three of the checklist booklet revisions. It turned out for the latest revision that Norv and I were still here from the original team and we asked Stan Temple to round out the team. That's a project which is still going, but this got started through Walter's initiative.
He also envisioned The Passenger Pigeon becoming a fine magazine. It had to start out as a mimeographed newsletter, but you start small. He was its first editor. Then he went into the service; he served in the Pacific during WW II, and Norv Barger became the editor at that time.
Walter was a very competent birder in the field, but he didn't get out very much because of the pressure of so many other things that occupied his time. His responsibilities with the Conservation Department increased through the years. When the time came for his retirement, one of the people who spoke at his retirement party referred to him as the "conscience of the Conservation Department" - an interesting term to use, but a very apt one in his case. I was never privy to some of the meetings where decisions were made, but people who were felt that Walter was the person who, more than any other, kept them on track as to what their fundamental purpose was as custodians of the land and all its creatures.
He was such a sincere person, and his interest in history was well known. He wrote 100-year summaries of conservation activities. When I started work on Wisconsin Birdlife, I knew right away who I wanted to do the bibliography, and he did an outstanding job. This became quite difficult in his last years because he lost his hearing, and some of the last conversations I had with him, I had to write down what I wanted to say. He'd read it and then orally respond to what I was writing, but he couldn't understand a word I said unless I wrote it down.
To illustrate how he and I shared similar beliefs, in my first parish in Neillsville, I was planning what we called, and still call, a "Layman Sunday." This was a Sunday when a service would be conducted and a sermon would be preached by a layman. I asked Walter to preach. He drove from Madison to Neillsville and delivered an outstanding sermon. I think he was addressing the stewardship theme that we on the earth are not owners of it; we are custodians of it. We can enjoy it while we have it, but we have the responsibility to pass it on. God didn't intend it for just one generation but for all generations. This was around 1947 or 1948, long before the idea was popular. In religious circles, we've talked about stewardship as long as I can remember. I can remember first hearing the word stewardship used in terms of conservation of natural resources. I think this happened during a course I took as an undergraduate. I have just associated stewardship with conservation since the word go, and Walter had too.
SM: He was a remarkable individual. What about A. W. Schorger [1884-1972, UW Professor of Wildlife Management]? What was he like?
SR: I didn't know Schorger nearly as well, but again I had great respect for him. He was the dean of the field birders during the time I was here in college. Everybody looked up to him and knew that he had the last word. Anything that Schorger said he saw, you believed right then and there. He was a collector. He would usually identify his birds without collecting them, but when he came across something rare, he wanted to collect the specimen. This didn't go over all that well with some of the other field birders during those days, but you might say that Schorger belonged in the transition age between the collector and the field observer.
SM: What was his personality like?
SR: It was pretty gruff. He was very friendly to a point with people that he really knew, but he wasn't the kind of outgoing person who would welcome a newcomer and bring him in the way Scott and Barger would. He did have great respect for other people. When I say "gruff," I don't remember that I ever heard cuss words coming out of his mouth. He had, however, a great expression for which he's been royally famous: when he came across a real rarity, he would say, "Oh my God!" Bill Foster could tell you stories about "Oh My God!" experiences that he had with Schorger. I have a couple, too.
I took Schorger out one time north of Madison. We were looking for a Ruff that had been discovered out on the Norway Grove pond. We didn't see it, but on the way back we saw an Eastern Bluebird on the wire. He said, "Oh my God! I haven't seen one of those near Madison in 10 years."
Schorger was a real scientist and a researcher of old newspapers. He was very thorough in digging up information about turkeys in the nineteenth century. I remember calling Schorger after I moved to Adams County and became aware that there were a few turkeys in the southern part of the county. When I told Bill about this, he said, "Those birds had to be remnants of the Baraboo Hills' transplants from back in the 1930s." I contacted him at the time that I heard about the death of the last of those turkeys, and I asked him to write an article about this for The Passenger Pigeon. He did. I think he was slower to accept my observation skills than some other people, but eventually he did respect me very much.
SM: What about Norv Barger [1908-1997, biologist with Wisconsin Conservation Dept., first WSO president]? What was he like?
SR: Norv Barger was the person more than any other who took me under his wing when I came here as a college freshman. I think at that time he was still engaged in sign painting. It was shortly afterwards that he joined the staff of the Wisconsin Conservation Department. He was a real field birder. I think I got acquainted with him because he knew my aunt and uncle with whom I was staying. He had already befriended my cousin, who lived in Madison, and who was interested in birds. Norv showed me some of the nice places to see birds. We enjoyed field work together. He encouraged me and helped me get to know other birders here. There were times that he would take me to WSO conventions when I probably just wouldn't have gone otherwise, and we did have some extended trips.
SM: Was there anyone back then who taught you more than you knew, or did you feel that you knew more than anyone?
SR: I think I knew more than most of them. I know this sounds bigheaded on my part. I don't mean it that way. The only course I took in college that involved birds significantly was a zoology course taught by Art Hasler, who was a fish expert. Half of his course was on birds. It was in the spring of the year and when it came time for field trips, he simply turned them over to me and said, "You know these birds better than I do. You take them on the trips and show them." There weren't any other professors teaching bird related courses. There was no John Emlen on campus at that time.
I was going to say a little bit more about Norv Barger. He was very active in the early years of WSO. Perhaps not quite as much with the creative ideas as Walter Scott had been, but he did have ideas that he developed. I think he was the one who planned what is now known as the WSO Book Store. I'm not real sure whether Scott had any part in that planning, but Norv Barger was the one who really organized it and stuck with it for some years before Harold Kruse took it over.
Norv was much more of a field man than Walter had been. Again, maybe because of various time commitments and so on, but Norv just loved to get out in the field. He was instrumental in collecting and publishing seasonal field notes in The Passenger Pigeon and was the one who held that these field notes ought to be preserved. So, soon after I settled in Wisconsin, he asked me to be the field notes editor of The Passenger Pigeon. He wanted to encourage individual research projects, but he was dealing much more with the amateur rather than with the professional on college campuses.
Norv had a work schedule that he had to follow, and of course when I was a college student, I had my class schedule to follow. I think much of the time, I would just go out by myself for a short period early in the mornings, but some of these trips were weekend trips.
One of the funniest experiences occurred during a late afternoon in May when I was going out to Hoyt Park. My college friends and I used to call it Sunset Point and go there for supper picnics. I had left a little early because I wanted to stop at the nearby cemetery to look and listen. But I didn't have my binoculars. I'd do what I could with my ears.
When I got to the cemetery, I detected a strange song I didn't know. So I listened and thought, "How do I get a look at this bird?" The only way to do it was to crawl under the wrought-iron cemetery fence. I crawled under the fence and walked to the trees where the bird was singing. The bird was up so high in the tree that I still couldn't tell what it was, but the bird kept singing repeatedly. It was driving me nuts because I thought, "This is a rare bird, and I can't identify it." The best thing I could do was to write down how the song sounded to me. I almost always carried paper and pencil with me, but had none that day. I crawled under the fence again, and just as I did, a bus stopped and a bunch of the kids heading to the same picnic were getting off. "What in the world was I doing crawling under a fence?" I told them I had heard a rare bird, and I begged from them pencil and paper. So they went on to the picnic, and I sat there at the side of the road writing down a description of the bird song.
Then I heard a car pull up. I fully expected the driver to be a policeman; it was Norv Barger. I told him what I was doing. He listened to the bird. We both crawled under the fence to try to get a look at it, but we couldn't see it any better. Norv said, "You stay here, and I'll go back." Pretty soon he came back with a wife and two pairs of binoculars. The singer turned out to be a Yellow-throated Warbler. Norv was from North Carolina originally and I think he probably recognized the song, but he wanted to be sure. With the binocs, we finally confirmed the identification, and in short order, half of Madison's ornithologists were out at the cemetery looking at that bird.
SM: Let me take this opportunity to ask you about your method for remembering bird calls. How do you keep your memory fresh?
SR: I think I have an unusual memory, but I don't think I've trained it. I was just blessed with it.
SM: So in other words, when you hear a bird, you remember it from that moment on? You always recall it?
SR: On several occasions, I've heard a bird that I hadn't heard for eight or 10 years and recognized it just like that. I'm lucky that way; it's just a gift.
SM: Has there been any other bird that you've heard in Wisconsin that you haven't known right away?
SR: Oh yes. When I first met up with Yellow-headed Blackbirds, which I hadn't come across out in New England, I had to learn a new song that I hadn't experienced previously. But in terms of birds that I had once learned, forgotten, and then run across, it would be hard to remember a time that that has happened.
Right now, with some hearing loss, I can hear a song that does not register with me as a song that I learned before, but it is the same song. There are certain overtones that I'm not picking up, so what I'm hearing is different than what I learned. In a sense, I'm having to relearn a few songs of birds that I once knew perfectly well, but now I can't catch the full song that I used to be able to hear.
SM: Do the high-end notes give you a problem?
SR: Not always. This is a puzzling thing. When Bill Foster and I are out together, he hears things that I don't hear, and I hear things that he doesn't hear, and it's not always the high-pitched sounds. Sometimes it's low-pitched notes For example, I can't hear the high-pitched sounds of Cedar Waxwings, Brown Creepers, and Golden-crowned Kinglets, and for some reason I also can't hear the low-pitched "peent" call of the Woodcock, nor distant calls of Black-capped Chickadees.
But all in all, I have been blessed with a combination of unusual hearing and an unusual memory. This memory generally extends to call notes. I think this is one of the things that has been a source of amazement to a lot of other people when I've been out on field trips. If I can hear a call note and can identify the bird right away, for example as a Red Crossbill, some people are amazed.
SM: Tell me about that, because you have to have spent quite a bit of time in the field learning call notes.
SR: Yes, it comes with experience. I don't know how you can teach call notes to other people very well.
SM: You mentioned you get out with Bill Foster. Where do you go?
SR: Locally, we visit the U.W. Arboretum, the Middleton ponds, and various places around the Madison lakes. We go to Mazomanie, to the Pine Bluff area, to Lodi Marsh, and to Fish and Crystal lakes. We bird the Norway Grove area, Goose Pond, and more distant spots like Horicon, Milwaukee, and Two Rivers.
SM: Which of your experiences afield in Wisconsin has been most memorable?
SR: I think I would rate the times I have gone to Plainfield and experienced the booming of the Greater Prairie-Chicken as particularly memorable. You would show up at the Hamerstrom's house about two o'clock in the morning, if you didn't happen to be staying overnight. Here was a place that looked as if it hadn't had a coat of paint for a good many years, but here lived a lovely couple of scientists. They fed us a little bit of breakfast and sent us out in the dark. I didn't know where in the world I was. They'd direct us to follow such and such a line to get to a blind. You'd get in the blind and you'd think that you couldn't possibly sit in such cramped conditions for a couple of hours straight. But once the excitement developed out on the dancing ground before your eyes, you would forget about how cramped you were and would just sit amazed to see those birds dancing, courting, confronting, and booming. To me, that was a memorable thing the first time I did it, and I think the wonder was only slightly less with each repetition.
There is another incident that I recall very fondly. When we lived in Adams County, we became acquainted with the birds on the Leola Marsh. We knew what it would be like to be out there on an early spring morning just as it was getting light. I had with me for an overnight guest, S. Paul Jones from Waukesha. I took him out on the marsh the following morning and the Ruffed Grouse were drumming, the Prairie Chickens were booming, the Sandhill Cranes were trumpeting, and over Paul's face came the most wonderful look of recollection. I wish I had a photograph of his face as he listened to that marsh music. He said, "We used to hear things like this in Waukesha County years ago!" That one sentence spoke to something that's been transpiring over a long period of time. He was reliving something that had been very precious to him in those early days. I have never forgotten that incident. How privileged I was to help open up this book of memories for Paul.
In connection with my book, I went to the Historical Society library and dug out many of his old field records. They helped me improve my understanding of what bird life was like back in his heyday. Another bird club, by the way, that was started fairly early and I think is still going strong was the Benjamin Goss Bird Club at Waukesha, and now there is a club named for Paul Jones at Oconomowoc. Paul was a very likeable fellow. I never knew that much about what research he did. But he would submit his field notes quite regularly to The Passenger Pigeon. And I had an occasion to look over those notes when they came in. I felt that he was a very active and accurate field observer, and he was one who pretty much limited his field work to his own local area.
SM: Any other experiences that stand out in your mind as exceptional?
SR: I can still remember quite vividly the day we discovered Wisconsin's first Ruff. I was with a carload of people from Madison. Norv Barger was driving; his wife, Clara, was along. I think Mary Walker may have been with us. We stopped at the Norway Grove pond in the middle of May and right away were aware of a lot of shorebirds. One of the first sounds I heard came from a Dowitcher, so I looked for it. In so doing, I passed over a bird that seemed like a pigeon in the water, but I had to check out that Dowitcher first to satisfy my ears. Then, I went back to look at the pigeon. Well, it wasn't a pigeon. It was a shorebird that had a pretty inflated area around its neck and throat. We didn't know what in the world that bird was at first. We didn't know for sure until we got back home and borrowed a couple of European field guides from Bill Foster. Then we confirmed that this bird was a Ruff.
So discovering the first Ruff in Wisconsin was a moment that will linger in my memory. Many people eventually saw that bird, but I'll think twice before I ever give up on a pigeon wading in water.
Another thing that really stands out is the years (1960-68) that we lived in Roberts in St. Croix County. I remember when I left Adams County to move to Roberts I thought, "Oh boy, my birding interests are going to really suffer here because I'm going into an area that is not nearly as exciting for birds as the one I am leaving." But I said that simply without knowing what to expect. Nobody that I knew of had birded much there. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Roberts was a wonderfully rich birding area.
One of the spots that made it especially so was just northeast of town. It was a wet area all year long, but in the spring, it would flood and develop into a particularly nice place for shorebirds. I had some memorable shorebird experiences there. I knew that DNR bought the north end of that land for waterfowl production. I expressed to somebody in the DNR the wish that they could develop that south end for shorebirds in spring and fall. I thought a fairly simple thing to do would be to plow the land around the edges so that you would keep the vegetation off and maintain a nice shallow wet area. I though it could become one of the finest shorebird migration spots in the state. I still think that. As far as I know, DNR still owns the land there. As far as I know, they haven't done a thing about my recommendation to them, but a year ago at a grassland symposium, I was speaking to someone who is now working in that area for DNR. In looking through the old files, he found my recommendations, and he expressed a real interest in this. I haven't been back there lately to know whether the area has changed significantly, but I still think that could be developed into an area that would be good for shorebirds every year. It would require only a minor investment of time and equipment. We took our son, Rick, out there once and observed both species of Godwits, Piping Plover, and a splendid display of "Willie-spinners" (Wilson's Phalaropes). It was just a bonanza. I think that something like that could happen just about every year.
SM: Owen Gromme [1896-1991, famous Wisconsin bird artist]. What was your impression of him?
SR: I found Gromme to be a very interesting person to talk with, and I wish to high heaven that I had had many more conversations with him than I did. Once I got started on Wisconsin Birdlife, I travelled to the museum and read his notebooks. We had known each other for a long time. I remember that when Gromme first announced he was starting work on his book, The Birds of Wisconsin, I became very interested in the project. I filled out many forms on my observations in the early 1940s. In 1942, my parents were due to have a 25th wedding anniversary. I thought how nice it would be if I could give them as a wedding anniversary present a copy of this new Wisconsin bird book that probably would have some of my field records in it. So I planned to give them a copy of Owen's book. Well heavens, look what happened. It never came out till long after my parents 50th anniversary and then after their death. But I was interested in the project and had been in conversation with Gromme about that book in its early stages.
Time went on, and I had relatively little occasion to go to Milwaukee. If I visited the Milwaukee Public Museum, it was to see the exhibits; it wasn't to see the people there. But Gromme and I knew each other on a first name basis, and whenever we did meet, we would have some nice conversations. Gromme was enthusiastic, very dedicated to his work, and a very talented person. He was a real conservationist at heart, and I felt we had a lot in common. I don't think I shared his appreciation of hunting, but that didn't make any difference.
The time came when Gromme decided that he didn't want to write the narrative parts of what eventually became Wisconsin Birdlife. He wanted to devote his years to painting. He must have thought highly enough of me to ask me if I would take over the writing project. At the time he asked me, I was so engrossed in preparing a master's thesis that I couldn't take on another project right then and there, but I said that if he would still be interested at the time I finished that, I would consider it. So the very day I sent my thesis off to my faculty advisor at UW-Stout, I sent a note to Gromme and said, "I finished the thesis. Do you still want me to take over the writing of the book?" "Yes, we do," he replied.
SM: Did you spend any time in the field with Paul and Emma Hoffmann?
SR: Very little. I knew them. We would see each other at WSO conventions. Paul and Emma were good contributors of articles to The Passenger Pigeon when I was the editor, so we corresponded quite a bit on those. I remember particularly an article on Black Terns that they sent in for publication. They were photographing terns on Big Muskego Lake. One of the photographs Emma must have taken. It was in their boat, and a Black Tern was perched on Paul's cap. I ran copies of two similar photos. The caption for one was: "Paul Hoffmann examining Black Tern," and the caption for the other was: "Black Tern examining Paul Hoffmann."
SM: What about Joe Hickey [1907-1993, UW-Madison Wildlife Ecology Professor]? What were your experiences with Joe?
SR: Again, they were very spotty in terms of frequency. Joe came to the University here at Madison about the time I left. We overlapped a little bit. In that brief overlap period, I can remember one time that he and somebody else and I were going to do a big May Day count, and I was living down on North Murray Street on the third floor of a house. I had set my alarm clock to go off so I would be ready when they picked me up. The alarm clock did not awaken me. I don't know if this was the clock's fault or if I slept right through it, but I became aware of a flashing light. I wasn't wide enough awake to fully grasp the situation, but I was aware that they were there to pick me up. They were flashing a spotlight from their car through my bedroom window; the light reflecting off the ceiling awakened me, but I was not wide enough awake to let these people know that I was now awake. So I went over to the window and started waving my hands up and down and only then did it dawn on me to turn on a light in the room. So I turned the light on and quickly dressed. I don't recall what birds we found, but I remember the stupid way in which the day began.
SM: Did Joe ask you what kind of a bird you were trying to imitate while waving your arms?
SR: Well, Joe had a sense of humor, and I'm sure he rubbed that one in. You know Joe had a New York accent, and he used it to play games with me. Whenever we saw a marsh hawk, he referred to it as a "mash" hawk. I think this was his way of pointing out that he could detect in my speech the New England tendency to mispronounce an "r." Joe was a lot of fun. He was a very good field observer. He loved to be out in the field watching birds, much more so than other university professors.
Joe had trained early as a field ornithologist. He was part of the Bronx County [NY] gang of young birdwatchers that eventually also included Roger Tory Peterson in their membership. He grew up with a lot of confidence in bird identification both by sight and sound, much more so than many native Wisconsinites. I really didn't see very much of Joe, but we did correspond occasionally.
He was very supportive and interested when I began Wisconsin Birdlife, and he was very encouraging, to the point of asking whether I could take a sabbatical from my minister's job for a year to work on the book. I had to write him and say that the question of a sabbatical was not possible. I just had to plug away on it in my spare time. Nowadays, ministers are given sabbaticals, but I never had one.
SM: What about Carl Richter [1903-1977, author of Breeding Birds of Oconto County]? Did you have any dealings with him?
SR: We corresponded, but I rarely met him. He never came to WSO meetings. He was not exactly a recluse, but he acted a little bit that way. I think he felt that he didn't have very much in common with the other birders in the Green Bay area. I think he felt that the Green Bay birders didn't appreciate oologists. He was an oologist and a very competent one.
I didn't meet him until the time that I started work on Wisconsin Birdlife. One of the first things I did when I undertook that project was to contact Carl. I knew that he had kept extensive field records, and I knew he was getting along in years. I wanted to get his data as best I could. So I designed a special kind of report form just for him to report his egg work. He was very accommodating. I went up to see him, and we went out in the field one morning. He and I enjoyed this because we were both quick to pick up things with our ears. We just had a glorious morning together. And he showed me different areas where he used to do his egg collecting. These were Oconto Marsh and Peshtigo Marsh. Many of the records he shared hadn't been reported, so this turned out to be a fortuitous move that really paid off and made the book a better one. And we did it just in time because he died before I finished the book.
SM: In the 1978 interview, you make reference to your "graph paper method" for keeping bird records. Describe that for me.
SR: At the beginning of the month, I make a list of those birds that I am most apt to see that month. I list these birds in the left hand column and then I draw 30 or 31 columns, depending on the number of days in the month. At the end of each day, I take a few moments to write down how many individuals of each species I remember seeing or hearing that day. Let me show you. Here is April, 1989. The birds that I saw are all listed along with the dates I did the observing, the estimated numbers, and a code indicating the county where the observation was made. I've been doing this since 1939. I have several notebooks of these records. There are very few months I've missed, and only a few months have incomplete records.
SM: Are there specific sites that you have gone to every year? Or are these observations you've made from wherever you have been?
SR: They are observations from wherever I've been. I try to indicate where I have gone.
SM: Have you ever made an attempt to summarize these records for a particular locality?
SR: I'm going to leave it to somebody else to do that.
SM: In the 1978 interview, you say: "It's a simple matter to go back to some of these records and determine where a given bird like a Chestnut-sided Warbler was found, when you first saw it, when it became fairly numerous, when it began to drop off."
SR: None of the other records that I found in Gromme's file or records from any other source give me much information on abundance. I have found these records of mine to be of tremendous value in giving me this information.
SM: One of your significant accomplishments was organizing the federal Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) in the state. Tell me more about the origins of that effort.
SR: Well, let me enlarge on that a little bit. Before my brother Chan conceived the idea of the federal Breeding Bird Survey and began to organize it, we talked with the WSO Board of Directors about trying to organize some kind of a summer count for Wisconsin. At the time, we were envisioning getting these going in a linear way so that you could compare figures from 1960 with 1961, '61 with '62, and so on for the same given areas. When I presented this to the Board of Directors, they said it would be a very desirable thing, but asked if I really thought that I would get many people involved. This would have been in 1960. I realized that most people put their binoculars away at the end of the spring migration and didn't take them out again for a few months, but I felt they were missing a great bet because of the summer birds that we have, particularly during the month of June before the song period ceases. We could get some significant information.
So the WSO directors finally said: "Go ahead and do one count, and we'll find some others." So we began this project in 1961 and ran it for five years. By the fifth year, we had 75 different areas covered. I summarized the counts in The Passenger Pigeon each year. I learned by 1965 that Chan was developing the federal Breeding Bird Survey project. I recognized right away that his methods were far superior to the ones we were following because they would give comparisons between different areas. I encouraged Chan to do this, and he said that he had been wanting to get something like this started; but he, too, had been fearful that he couldn't get people to go out birding in June. When he saw what success we were having in Wisconsin, he decided that it was worth a try. So in a way I think we gave him a boost in organizing that project, which has proved to be so successful.
We gave up on our first project as soon as Chan's got started. So by 1966, we switched from our "summer bird survey" to the North American BBS. The summary that we finished recently is a 26 year summary, 1966-91.
SM: In your 1978 interview, you also said: "I have been doing some thinking about writing a little booklet of meditations, religious meditations based upon my observations of nature. This could help other people see for themselves the things in nature that lead to an understanding and appreciation of God. It would make them better environmentalists, better stewards of the world we live in. I think it could do a lot of good." Have you given any further thought to that project?
SR: Not exactly. But what I have done instead is to write a column every week for backyard bird lovers through The Country Today. I began writing that in January 1977. I had an article in the first issue they ever published. I think I've missed only three weekly issues in that 20 year period. If I took a vacation, I would write an article ahead of time so they would have something to use. I still get quite a bit of feedback on my articles. Rarely a week goes by that I haven't received a letter. These letters are so appreciative that if there was such a thing as an apostle to the backyard bird watcher, I probably fulfill that role to some extent. Maybe someday I might tackle a book that does this in a more direct way. I don't know if you remember seeing it or not, but we did publish in The Passenger Pigeon a few years ago a poem I wrote titled "Only God can make a bird."
SM: So your writings in The Country Today have led to a greater appreciation of God?
SR: I think that most anyone who reads those articles would recognize that there are religious overtones to what I write. The word stewardship covers a lot of my feelings. We here on earth don't really own anything. All of creation essentially is God's and is intended for all God's creatures and all generations. I feel that I am very much a part of God's creation and that God intended that we have a harmonious relationship with all of nature. I accept the idea that I am responsible to try to keep the natural world in as good condition as possible, so I have taken a deep interest in conservation matters. I feel that the coming generations have just as much right to enjoy the things that I enjoy, so I want to be sure that I do my part to keep things in good shape.
For one particular moment in time I may be responsible for a particular plot of ground that I own, but I don't really own it. I have the responsibility for it because some previous owner passed it on to me, and I want to pass it on to people who come after me. I also feel that from a larger perspective, there are going to be growing societal needs: land needed for industry, land needed for transportation, land needed for agriculture, land needed for recreation, land needed for commercial enterprises, and so on. The larger the population becomes, the more intense is the competition for this land. We have to take a very broad view of this in terms of determining which land is best suited for what purposes and then try to make policy decisions that will reflect the best use that preserves the land for generations to come. Land use is not just a conservation issue but an issue our society is facing in every way. There is such a great tendency for people to be selfish about this. Short sighted. We need to take everybody's need into consideration and particularly those of the coming generations.
SM: How, then, can we develop a more ethical regard for the land?
SR: To me, it all starts with one's belief in God. If you accept the idea that all of this is God's creation and we human beings are here as children of God, then we have a fundamental responsibility to protect the land. The relationship between a person and God is one of love.
SM: Have you felt the presence of God in the outdoors?
SR: Very much so. The more I have come to know birds and their habits and migration patterns, the more convinced I am that all of life is a part of the whole creative process I associate with God. In my mind, the Bible asserts that God created everything; and science and evolution help us to understand the process by which God has accomplished all of this. When I think of the unique feathering of birds, it is abundantly clear that human beings can't manufacture bird feathers. I can't go to a store to buy a bird feather that will operate as well; these things are created in a way that's beyond our human understanding. So the more I learn about birds, the more respect I have for the Creator.
SM: Here you are at your 75th birthday and you have just had the 50th anniversary of your ordination. What does the future look like for Sam Robbins as far as continuing to bird and travel?
SR: I have quite a few places that I would love to travel to, but I realize that when it comes to trying to go to new places and see new birds, my energy limitations are going to restrict me to what I call roadside birding. I have never been a real strong hiker, probably because I've got just too much stuff to carry around with me every place I go. I get tired so quickly. I couldn't begin to do the things that you do when you go out and collect Trumpeter Swan eggs. That sounds to me like something for athletic gymnasts and that kind of thing. I have more and more become a roadside birder simply because of my limited strength. I could explain this very nicely and say that I am just plain too big around; it has made a lot of field work difficult.
Just to give you an illustration of this, last winter Bill Foster, his wife, and I went up to northern Wisconsin. One of the things we really wanted to do was help Bill find a Spruce Grouse, which is one of the birds that he had never seen. So we got in touch with Larry Gregg. That happened to be a winter when the snow was not particularly deep. Larry said, "Come along, and we will help you hike out in the swamp." Well, when I got there and I saw what hiking this was going to involve, I gave up. I couldn't do it. And Jimmy, Bill's wife, said she wasn't going to do it either. But Bill wanted to see this Spruce Grouse bad enough that he hiked out with Larry. It was easy for Larry; he has done this kind of thing all the time. Bill was utterly fagged out when he got back. Jimmy and I stayed out on the road and did some birding there, and when we got back to our starting point, Bill was all smiles and was thumbs up. I wish I had had a camera to capture the look on his face. A real look of triumph and satisfaction. I would have dearly loved to have been there with him, but when it comes to trampling through the brush with no trails, it's just plain too hard for me.
But even when I was younger and healthier, I did not particularly enjoy some of the more difficult hiking. This business of climbing hills and really getting back into the brush where you have to go to see some birds is simply beyond me now healthwise, so I have got to live with certain limitations. I realize that something can happen any moment that may make a major change in my health condition, but if I continue to have sufficient strength, health, and energy, I am anxious to visit new places and try to see birds that I am less familiar with.
I enjoyed very much an Elderhostel trip to Texas last winter. I didn't see any new life birds, but that wasn't important to me. What was important was that I developed a better acquaintance with a whole bunch of birds that I have rarely encountered before. I would like to get back to Arizona. I have been there a little bit when our son lived in Phoenix. We'd go there every now and then. I'd love to go to New Mexico for waterfowl. I have only been to Florida once. I don't know whether I'm real anxious to try a pelagic trip. I've never been on a real honest to goodness pelagic trip, but I think this would be real fun if I could do it and keep my tummy in place. I would love to see the fall shorebird migration around Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. I have never done this. There are places in the Rocky Mountains that would be great to go to, but again what can you do if you are limited to roadside birding? A lot of those specialties that you would really look for are probably just out of reach.
SM: Is there any place in Wisconsin you haven't been? And what is your favorite area for birding in Wisconsin?
SR: If you had asked me that question back when I started work on Wisconsin Birdlife, I would have given you several key areas of the state that I didn't know much about. So I made it a point during my first two or three years of work on that book to get out into some of those areas. I think I filled in the worst of the blanks in terms of statewide coverage. I had an advantage I think that lots of other people don't have: I moved about every 10 years from one location to another. This gave me a good chance to sample bird life in quite a variety of locations. I am sure that there are still places in the state that I don't know nearly as well as I might. There are some areas around the Eau Pleine Flowage that I visited but not nearly as much as I would have liked. Other places are the national forests up north where I have never really spent much time. But, overall, I am probably more familiar with most areas of the state than most people.
One hankering that I've had that I've never fully satisfied is to be up on Wisconsin Point in Superior at a time when there's a "fallout" -- a large number of visiting migrants, exhausted after a long travel. I have been there and camped overnight when I thought the migration would be good, but I have never seen a real fallout there. There are hawk observation points I would like to spend more time at, and I would like to spend some time at night in areas where they trap owls. I haven't done much of any of that. Another place that I have visited only rarely that intrigues me is Seagull Bar up in Marinette, but there again the trouble is it's a long hike over soft sand, and I don't think my energy level would permit this now the way it used to.
It could be that there are some areas along the Illinois border that I don't know nearly as well as one might. I was quite intrigued with one of the atlas reports that came from a fellow working down in the Brooklyn Wildlife Area where he found a Worm-eating Warbler. I didn't know there were any Worm-eating Warblers there. At other places down there, they recorded a Prairie Warbler about a year and a half or so ago. I would never have guessed that a southern bird like that was in there. There may be other places in the southern tier of counties that we're overlooking.
One of my favorite areas that I did visit often was the area around Roberts and Hudson in St. Croix County. I did a lot of birding there in the 1960s and have returned a few times since then. That is an area I never tire of because of the nice variety of birds, especially during the migration and the summer season. Another thing that I remember enjoying so very much and that I never get enough of is canoeing on the Bois Brule River. John Degerman used to take me down the river once every year just out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted to learn the birds, and he knew I could teach him the bird songs, so we would canoe the river. The chorus of birds you get, with the Winter Wrens and the Parula Warblers, is just heavenly. So that became really an all-time favorite trip of mine. I don't think I've been on the Bois Brule River for 20 years.
There is another area that intrigues me from a mysterious point of view, but I would want to go with somebody who knows the area very well. That area is the Wolf River bottoms between New London and Hortonville. My interest in that area comes from reading the reports of Prothonotary Warblers that Father Dayton used to write. These were reports that he used to send in to Owen Gromme. He did his observations in the early years of the 20th century, but he described year after year Prothonotary Warblers in those river bottoms.
In the early 1970s, I had no idea whether the habitat was still adequate. Nobody had been reporting from there for years. I stopped there one July day on my way to Green Bay and found that not only was the habitat still acceptable, but I heard a Prothonotary Warbler singing and this was past the song period, about the 20th of July! I made it a point a couple of years after that to get over there in June. There were Prothonotary Warblers there every time. So I am presuming that these birds were probably present as breeding birds and they were also present during those early years. To really get a handle on this, a person needs to go in a canoe. There are so many backwaters out there that I would get lost if I tried it myself. I talked with Daryl Tessen about this and he had the same feeling: he doesn't know that area well enough to pilot a canoe through there. But with someone who is familiar with the area, we might discover more Prothonotary Warblers and other southern river bottom birds, such as Yellow-Billed Cuckoos and Cerulean Warblers, too. I would like to be a part of a team that goes there some time.
I'm not an avid bird lister. I keep lists, and if you give me time, I will count up a list and tell you how many how many I have got on my life list, but right now I don't know what I've got. I enjoy seeing a lifer almost as much as the next fellow, but I enjoy just as much seeing a rare bird I have seen before. So I keep going afield often.
Bill Foster and I go birding once or twice a week together, and we go where we hope we will get greater varieties of birds. Bill is good for me, and I think I am good for him, and in that way, we complement each other. So I hope to keep on doing this, and to maintain my list of arrival and departure dates. I always send them in to WSO so they can continue to become a part of the broad basic knowledge that may be useful to other people.
I will tell you, Sumner, when I was writing Wisconsin Birdlife, I could find in The Passenger Pigeon all kinds of first arrival dates for birds that would help me to tell people when to expect certain species in different parts of the state, but I could not find much in the way of peak dates. I could also not find much in the way of departure dates, and often times, I was just driven back to my own records. These little charts I showed you help you to gauge when the peak migration period is as well as the first and last dates of occurrence. I wish to high heaven that more people who are keeping these kinds of records would publish them in The Passenger Pigeon. I think they are much needed.
SM: Over the years since 1939, have you had experiences with species that have declined?
SR: One of the prime cases that comes to mind is the Bewick's Wren. I rarely encountered Bewick's Wrens before I moved to Adams County in 1951. I was very pleasantly surprised when I moved to Adams to find that I could hear Bewick's Wrens from my backyard every year. There were four or five singing males scattered around the city. Here was this bird that seemed to be so rare other places; it seemed to be present in some numbers up our way. This continued for much of the time that we lived there. I noticed that by about 1958 or so, I wasn't hearing these birds as much as I used to. When I made trips back there after moving away in 1960, I couldn't find one anymore. It took a while for it to sink in to me that this bird had just plain disappeared. I think it's disappeared from Wisconsin. I don't think we have had a state record for years now, and when the DNR was asking for recommendations for what birds to consider as endangered, I pointed this out to them. Bewick's Wren wasn't on their list at first. It has disappeared over this whole part of the country, and I really have no explanation for it.
Another case in point is the Piping Plover. Again, I rarely saw Piping Plovers any time, but I could always go up to Wisconsin Point in Superior in the summer and find a Piping Plover at two or three different places. Not any more. In that case, I think it was the dune buggies that destroyed their nests and scared the birds away, but that bird doesn't nest in Wisconsin anymore, does it?
SM: No, it hasn't since 1983. The Duluth-Superior Harbor used to have as many as eight nesting pairs back in the late 1970s, and now there are none.
SR: Just recently, the pronounced decline in grassland species has been staring us all in the face. I think what made me aware of that was not so much my field observations as my analysis of the Breeding Bird Survey data. I can recall when I first noticed that these species were declining. I called DNR's attention to it, and they followed through and saw that, yes indeed, the Western Meadowlark particularly had declined seriously. I have looked back at my records from when we lived in Mazomanie from 1948 to 1951. On almost every May/June field trip, I heard six or eight or more Henslow's Sparrows in that area. I haven't heard a Henslow's Sparrow out in the Mazomanie area for years and years. Again, this is evidence of a decline. We might attribute some of that to changes in land use, but I suspect it's more than that. The Red-headed Woodpecker decline concerns me a great deal. I see far fewer of those than I used to.
SM: Enough to warrant listing as endangered or threatened in the state?
SR: I would say a lot more study is needed before listing should be considered. I would nominate it, however, as a Species of Special Concern. That's a hard bird to find in northern Wisconsin now.
The Purple Martin situation is also cause for concern. About the only place where I can find a Purple Martin in Madison in summertime is out on the west end of Lake Mendota right by the Mendota boat landing. Now, I haven't investigated all around Lake Mendota or Lake Monona, so there may be other colonies that I'm not aware of, but on my field trips nowadays, I have missed Purple Martins a lot more than I have found any, and I suspect this is a fairly serious condition. I suspect it is more pronounced in the western half of the state than it is the eastern half. If I am along Lake Michigan or Green Bay, I see fair numbers of Purple Martins there, but in the western half of the state, I just don't find them.
SM: Why do you think they have declined?
SR: I think that some of this could be traced to prolonged cold spells during the nesting season. Somewhere I have seen in print something to the effect that if the temperature stays under 50 degrees Fahrenheit for as much as 72 consecutive hours that Purple Martins cannot survive. I think we have had a few cold spells now and then, and this would explain why one part of the state could be affected much more than another part. So I am suspicious, but I haven't performed any individual studies and have only analyzed Breeding Bird Survey data. The Breeding Bird Survey data, however, show a pronounced decline.
SM: What about other species?
SR: I suspect that we are getting declines in Whip-poor-wills. I also suspect that in northern Wisconsin it's pretty hard nowadays to find Screech-Owls. They seem to be numerous in the southern part of the state, but I rarely find them farther north. When I lived in St. Croix County, I found them during the first two to three years that I was there, and then nothing after that. When I lived in Chippewa County, I found them the first couple of years, then nothing after that. I don't think my evidence is strong enough to really do any flag waving on it, but I am suspicious that there are declines.
Regarding waterfowl, I find Pintails are awfully hard to find nowadays. Black Ducks - well, when I was a kid growing up in New England, you had lots of Black Ducks and no Mallards, but now even out there, it's the other way around. They've got mostly Mallards and very few Black Ducks.
SM: Did you see a decline in Loggerhead Shrikes?
SR: Yes; this was quite pronounced. I didn't see many Loggerhead Shrikes until we got to St. Croix County in 1960. But then for three to four years, I found Loggerhead Shrikes on almost every summer field trip I took. I don't know if it was 1964 or 1965, but I was noticing that the places that had had them in previous years no longer had them. When I moved away from there in 1968, I think I had probably been through a couple of years without seeing one. So, definitely, that picture has changed since the 1940s-50s.
SM: What about the Greater Prairie-Chicken? Fran Hamerstrom indicated that there used to be Prairie-Chickens in every county in the state.
SR: When I came to Wisconsin in 1939, I heard people talk about Prairie-Chickens and about how they used to be everywhere. But by the late 1930s, they had just about disappeared from the southern counties. There was some indication out in the Mazomanie grasslands that you might still hear one. I made a point of going out there a couple of times with friends and we heard Prairie-Chickens just a few times, probably around 1940 or so, and that was the last. So I got in on just the tail end of the stand of the Prairie-Chicken in southern Wisconsin.
Let me say a few words about the Peregrine Falcon. One vivid experience I remember occurred in the summer of 1937. I came out from Massachusetts and spent a few weeks with relatives here. I camped out on a sandbar in the Wisconsin River one night, right below Ferry Bluff. All night long the screaming of the Peregrine was going on. I don't know if we got any sleep that night or not. I presume that the parents were feeding young all that time, and it just seemed as if they were doing it 'round the clock. They put on a great show. I'd have to check my records as to how many times I saw Peregrines out there after that time, but they soon disappeared.
SM: In your "Best of the Nest", a collection of articles written for The Country Today, one that really struck me as different from all others, and which was probably the most moving, was the piece titled "Still Singing".
SR: That was about the Hermit Thrush.
SM: The Hermit Thrush, as well as about the young girl who lost her life. What kind of response did you have to that piece?
SR: My editor thinks that was the best one I ever wrote, and I agree that it was one of my best. He was very much touched by it. Several people wrote very appreciatively about that piece.
SM: What were you thinking when you wrote it?
SR: I had been involved in this girl's life. She was a parishioner of mine. I discovered the bird near the time that this girl died, and I just naturally put two and two together. I wrote a poem at the end. I don't get into poetry very much, but it does happen on a few occasions.
I wrote a poem one time after I saw a tree cut down. In that case, I was just struck by how in just a few minutes time you could take down a tree that probably had been growing for 100 years or more. The stark contrast between the slowness of the growth and the quickness of the fall really got to me.
SM: I also read your piece about the crows. What is your feeling about the impending crow season?
SR: I am very much against it, and I think that the legislators in the state capitol know this, the DNR Board knows this, and some of the DNR people. I just think that whole thing is going to detract from public appreciation of hunting in general. I think the fact that people would stoop to such things as the willful destruction of crows that they don't want to use for anything is awful. Crows will just be target practice for them. I think this is some of the worst kind of stewardship.
SM: That's essentially why you were against the crow season, isn't it? That it serves no purpose?
SR: Right. It's just catering to the killer instinct in people that I think needs to be controlled and kept under wraps.
I remember once coming across a kid who was trying to shoot a Snowy Owl. We got to talking and he said, "I know that owl's around, and I am looking for it." I asked him if he would actually shoot that owl if he found it. He began to feel a little sheepish about it. I told him a few things about Snowy Owls and about how they migrate from Canada, how they feed on other creatures and so on, and told him about the feathering that an owl has. To make a long story short, he decided that killing a Snowy Owl was a very bad idea.
I did the same thing one time with a youngster up in Solon Springs. I had stopped at a restaurant for breakfast, and outside the restaurant, there was a colony of Cliff Swallow nests on the side of the building. A kid was out there throwing stones at the nests, knocking them down. So I interrupted my breakfast and went out and said some of the same things, partly to shame the guy, but more to educate him. He quit.
I like talking to people. I like lecturing especially when there is give-and-take afterwards where people can ask questions or make comments. I don't like this one-way-street type of thing where I am doing all the talking and never any listening. I have enjoyed writing the articles for The Country Today. I don't know which book I could say that I enjoyed more - the scholarly one on Wisconsin birds, or the much more casual one for backyard birders.
Related to my scholarly efforts, I feel that my role in research has been more the collecting and compiling of data that we get from other people, such as with the Breeding Bird Survey, than individual research studies of my own. I think I have made some discoveries about Connecticut Warblers that were new to the ornithological community. I did the same thing with LeConte's Sparrows some years back, but those instances are few and far between. I accomplish more by collecting data from many people, putting these together, and then analyzing them in a way that makes sense.
When I lived in St. Croix County in the early 1960s, I would make two or three trips up to the northwestern part of the state every year. One particular June morning, I was just driving along a stretch of road east of Solon Springs with the window down when I heard a Connecticut Warbler. I recognized that song instantly. At that time, the Connecticut Warbler was thought to be a very rare summer resident. Owen Gromme had a nesting record of it on one of his museum expeditions, but the bird community thought of the Connecticut Warbler as being a bird of the swamps. Here I was in dry jack pine area when I heard a song that really surprised me. I drove a little bit further. By golly, I heard another one, and I got the idea to make the trip a Connecticut Warbler expedition. To make a long story short, in two hours driving - maybe 12 miles - in that jack pine area, I found 41 singing Connecticut Warblers. I just drove back and forth on some of the side roads. Then I wrote this up and took a few other occasions to go to some other jack pine areas. I found Connecticut Warblers there, too. I read the literature to see if other people had been finding this bird in jack pines, and I couldn't find any references. So I wrote an article in The Passenger Pigeon called "New Light on the Connecticut Warbler." I began getting feedback from people in Minnesota, and received a letter from Earl Godfrey in Canada. Earl said that he had started finding Connecticut Warblers in jack pine, and when other people read this article and they started checking jack pine areas, they began finding Connecticut Warblers, too. Now we've got quite a different idea as to its habitat preferences. In certain jack pine barrens in northern Wisconsin, this is a fairly numerous bird.
In the case of the LeConte's Sparrow, I had mistaken its song. I had heard it several times over a period of years and assumed that it was an abbreviated Savannah Sparrow song, but one morning while I was in St. Croix County, I heard the song real well and recognized it was not that of a Savannah Sparrow. I finally hunted the singer down, and I got a look at it. For the first time in my life, I felt that I knew the song of the LeConte's Sparrow. Having learned that song, I found that if I was out real early in the morning, I could hear that song in quite a few places. So I deliberately explored extensive grass meadows in a few places in the northern counties, and I found LeConte's Sparrows all over the place. Again, this was a kind of habitat that people had not associated with this bird. They thought of it as a marsh bird, and here I was in dry upland grass meadows. I corresponded with Carl Richter about this, and he mentioned that most of his observations were in swampy areas but that he had sometimes found them in dry grass areas, too. So eventually I began examining all my records obtained by hearing this bird. I noticed that most of the records that I had were real early, before it got light, and that anytime after about six o'clock in the morning, I stopped hearing this bird. That was another reason why other people hadn't been hearing this bird. On some WSO convention trips up north, I began to point out the song to other observers. Once other people learned the song, they found it in more places. So I wrote an article called "New Light on the LeConte's Sparrow."
In 1973, the AOU decided to split the Alder and Willow Flycatchers. Once this was done, the question became: Which of these do we have in Wisconsin? I had some information in my field notes that I could draw upon to help answer this question because the identification is mostly by sound. You can hardly tell these birds apart by looking at them. But the songs were enough different that I could recall my first experience with what we now call the Willow Flycatcher; that was out here near Black Earth in the summer of 1937. I met up with this bird, and for the life of me, I didn't know what it was. It looked like an Alder Flycatcher. It did not sound like the Alder Flycatchers I had grown up with in New England. What finally tipped me off was a statement in Peterson's first field guide that said that birds west of Ohio sing a different song. He verbalized "Wee-bee-o" for the Alder and "Fitz-bew" for the Willow. He didn't call them Alder and Willow; he simply called them different songs of the Alder Flycatcher. So, from that time on, I put down in my notes any time I heard an Alder Flycatcher an "E" for east or "W" for west. I had a lot of data at the time the split was made, so I went back over my records. It seemed to me as if the east-west designation was wrong, that it was more of a north-south designation. So I put all of this together for an article in The Passenger Pigeon. I wrote that article primarily upon my own observations, and I concluded that northern Wisconsin had Alders, southern Wisconsin had Willows, and that there was quite a band of overlap, rather narrow in the western part of the state, but becoming broader as you moved east in the state. I think that time has proved this a fairly accurate assessment. There are a few more areas of overlap than what I anticipated at that time, but the general picture has held true. We were ahead of just about all of the other states in determining which flycatchers were present, simply because I had these data going back several years.
SM: What was your impression of Roger Tory Peterson [1909-1996]?
SR: Very likeable man, soft spoken, very sincere, very creative; at the time that I knew him, his fame was already established. I did not feel that he was a person who would not associate with beginner-type people simply because he had reached the prominence he had. I can recall in the early 1980s when Chan came out with his revision of his field guide [Birds of North America, Golden Press] just as Peterson did - I think they were just two or three years apart. Some of the reviewers made the point that these two fellows were competing against each other and that they were potential rivals. My impression was just the opposite: that they were friends much more than rivals.
One issue I brought up with Roger, and I was surprised by his opinion, was Cowbird control. The issue about whether we needed to take measures to control Cowbirds was being batted around quite a bit in 1993. I wondered what Roger's point of view on this was. He felt that we should do little or nothing in the way of Cowbird control. He felt that it wasn't as big an issue as some people were making it out to be. I didn't agree with him on that. I think the situation with Kirtland's Warblers and Golden-cheeked Warblers is pretty well documented at least when you're dealing with some endangered species and very limited habitat. We almost have to choose between Cowbirds and those warblers. I'm afraid its reached a point where we need to be making those choices.
SM: Have there been other issues that have especially captivated your attention?
SR: I have spoken out on the wise use of pesticides for a long time. I did it when I was editor of The Passenger Pigeon. This was primarily during the DDT era when we lost elm trees and robins. We devoted an entire issue of The Passenger Pigeon to this subject. We had articles written by four different people, and we had reprints of these sent to all of the chemical companies in Wisconsin. We didn't realistically expect we would change any minds and practices, but we felt that we wanted our voices to be heard, and we wanted people in these chemical companies to know that they were dealing with something that was a lot bigger than what they were recognizing at the time.
There were communities that had special Town meetings on whether or not to use DDT. There was an option at that time to use methoxychlor instead of DDT; it had much less effect on other creatures. But it was more expensive. Some communities did decide to go to the more expensive stuff to try to control dutch elm disease. I think I became interested in this issue partly through Chan because Chan was part of a team that was studying some of the effects of DDT on wildlife shortly after World War II when the use of DDT was in its infancy. He knew more about it, and I think he was raising some issues on this, but being a government employee, I don't know whether some of the reports that he made got shoved under the table for political reasons. I'd like to talk to him about this some time.
SM: So he may have known about DDT's effects well before the public knew?
SR: I think so. I would say that Chan and I never had as much a chance to communicate about things like this that many people might think brothers would. We'd see each other once or twice a year, and whenever we'd get together, we'd have a million other things to talk about. I just have never had the chance to discuss with Chan a lot of the things I would have liked to through the years.
SM: When did you first notice the impact of DDT on songbirds?
SR: It was the Robin situation that first came to light.
SM: Tell me about that. What happened?
SR: The widespread use of DDT coincided with the spread of dutch elm disease, and when dutch elm disease reached southeastern Wisconsin, there was enough known about how this was devastating the elm trees in the eastern United States that communities were gung ho on trying to do something to save their elm trees. And I would say that this probably centered around Milwaukee and its suburbs and Madison and its suburbs as much as any other place. The people who were trying to stop dutch elm disease were using DDT like crazy; it was only as this was going on and people began seeing dead Robins all over their lawns that the picture began to emerge that DDT was, first of all, not stopping the spread of dutch elm disease, and secondly, it was having a serious effect on some of our songbirds. It was most noticeable with the Robins because the elm trees that people were trying to save were in suburban areas where Robins were particularly conspicuous. When people began finding dead Robins all over the lawns, they began to be much more concerned.
I remember attending a hearing one time when I thought it was very obvious that there was a link between DDT use and songbird loss. One fellow from the university here, I forget his name, was travelling around the state to all of these different hearings and promoting the idea that these chemicals should be used. He was denying that there was any evidence this was the cause of the decline of some songbirds. I just felt like throwing mud in his eye. How could he stand up there and say something that was blatantly wrong?
SM: And then around that time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring.
SR: I'm sure that had an effect, too. I felt very much in agreement with her and thankful that she was such an effective spokesperson on this issue.
SM: Rachel Carson opened everyone's eyes. No question she had a big impact. By this time, you had met Bill Foster and were spending a lot of time birding together, something you continue to do. Tell me about him.
SR: Bill grew up in Tennessee. He is a self-taught birder. He did not belong to organizations or have parents who encouraged him and taught him birds. He had to learn everything by himself. But he did a good job of it. He was very much interested in birds as a boy.
Bill's a private individual. And he's done some very significant things for our country. He was very much in the forefront of the school desegregation issues that affected our country. He doesn't talk about it very much, but from what he does tell me, I think that he was a very influential person and calming influence in some rather explosive situations. One of the ways in which we're different is that I love to go to meetings with other bird people, and you couldn't get Bill near a meeting if his life depended on it.
Bill and I first met in the mid 1950s, shortly after he came to Wisconsin to teach in the law school. I don't remember just how we happened to meet, but we hit it off together because we were both competent field ornithologists. We had occasion to go out in the field together once or twice and we just so enjoyed each other's company that whenever I had occasion to come to Madison, which was rather infrequent, we'd get together. Or if anything brought him up to where I was living, we'd get together and do a little birding. When I retired and moved to Madison, Bill and I were both relishing the thought of getting together much more often. So here we are going into the field about once a week, just enjoying each other's company, aging together, and gradually losing our hearing together. I think we've been good for each other.
We've been to Texas together a couple of times, Florida, Montana, and Colorado. I think he's felt that because I've lived so much of my life without going to some of these fancy bird places that he just gets a big kick out of helping me broaden my experiences.
As much as I like being with other people at times, I also like equally well the times when I can be alone. And the times when I am alone, I think I've become more observant. I wish to high heaven that I knew more about what I'm looking at. I see plant life, but I don't know much about botany. I think about my uncle, Frank Seymour, who combined a career as a minister with that of a botanist. Most of his life was spent in Massachusetts, but he did come out here for pastorates at Appleton and Tomahawk for a few years. He wrote a book on the flora of Lincoln County while he was here. He wrote books on the flora of New England. He really was an outstanding botanist. How I wish I had his knowledge and understanding of plant and animal life! I feel as if I know only a tiny fraction of the natural world. If I knew more, I would appreciate more of it, but every new level of appreciation I have makes me think more reverently of a divine creator.
SM: Tangentially, the history of ornithology is full of examples of ministers and other religious people who became interested in and studied birds. Gilbert White, for example, is renowned for his The Natural History of Selbourne. What was it about the ministry that attracted you, and at what age did you become interested in wanting to serve God?
SR: That's an interesting question with sort of a "roundabout" answer. My parents were faithful church goers, and so we kids went to church and Sunday school regularly. I can't say that I had any inkling or desire to enter the ministry during those years. As a matter of fact, I kind of chafed at it.
When I left home and went to college, and was more on my own, I didn't go to church much and I lived with an aunt and uncle who didn't go to church much, but I was very much interested in the student group connected with the congregational church here. So I would go to their Sunday evening social affairs. The minister to students at that time was a fellow whom we called "Parson Jim" - Jim Flint. I developed a great admiration for him and through him began to see religion differently. He had a sincere love for people, and he put into practice what the Christian faith was all about. So I started going to church a bit more often.
Between my sophomore and junior years in college, I spent a summer working at a Salvation Army camp in the New York City region. They had long church services for their kids on Sunday mornings; some of these impressed me. It wasn't the brand of religious service and practice that I especially enjoyed, but because of the dedication of people leading these programs, I turned toward taking the church more seriously. While I had had no desire to be a minister, I think my parents had instilled in me a desire to use my life in some kind of an occupation where I could be of service to people. I really thank my parents for that great emphasis.
What a person who chooses to be a minister needs to feel at some point along the line is that God calls that person to enter the profession. I felt all along a sense of a real relationship to God. My parents had helped me feel that God was calling me to a life of service. The question was, what kind of service, how to channel that sense of calling. The channeling didn't come until I was between my junior and senior year in college.
One Sunday between my junior and senior years in college, I sat in church here. Alfred Swan preached a sermon that dealt with the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and how the minister at that time in the funeral oration had spoken so powerfully against dueling that dueling practically disappeared in the country after that time. I thought to myself, "By golly, if a minister can really make that kind of a difference, then maybe that's what I really should do." Alfred Swan, incidentally, presided over Joe and Lola Hickey's marriage, and on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary he did the same for Shirley and me!
Now, preceding this realization of deciding to be a minister had been a period of wandering in "no man's land." I had started college with the idea that I wanted to be a math teacher, but I struggled with calculus to the point that I decided that math was not for me. This would have been 1939-40. Having that idea knocked out of me, there was nothing to take its place.
I eventually went to A.H. Edgerton, who was a counselor to students here, and he gave me a whole battery of tests during my sophomore year. In one of these tests, he scored my aptitude or interest - I'm not sure how much was aptitude and how much was interest. He said, "I'll score you for a teacher." And then he said, "You turn out moderately high here." And I said, "How about as a scientist?" I was thinking about my bird interest, and he said, "You score moderately high here." What about school administrator? "You don't score quite so high here." I named several other possible occupations. Then he said, "Let me guess some. I want to score you for a farmer." I laughed at that. I never grew up on a farm. I hardly knew which was the front end of a tractor. He said, "You score very high as a farmer!" So then he said, "Let me score you for a minister. This scores very high." And I said, "Well, that's interesting, but I'm really not interested there." He said he was looking for something where there was both aptitude and interest. He explained that aptitude and interest are not the same things.
As a result of all of this, I decided to change my major to natural science. I would study to teach science in high school. A few months after that and after my Salvation Army experiences and contact with Alfred Swan, I began to think seriously about possibly training to be a minister. What had shown up on Professor Edgerton's tests came back to me, and it gave me great encouragement. And, Sumner, I needed that encouragement because as soon as I breathed to my friends that I was considering this, the universal reaction was: "No, don't do it! Not you!" I asked "why?" and they said that a minister had to be able to communicate and talk effectively. He needed to be an orator. I said, "I agree that I am no orator, but I just wonder whether with the right kind of training, I could learn some better speech habits." The chorus of discouragement that I got at that point was loud and clear.
You see, I mumbled. I didn't articulate my words well at all. I didn't project my voice. I had taken a speech course in college, but it hadn't really done that much good.
Next chance I had back home, I talked this over very seriously with my dad because of his interest in speech. He referred me to a friend on the Emerson College faculty who could help evaluate my chances of developing acceptable speech habits. So I spent an hour with him, and at the end of that time, he asked me point blank: "How badly do you want to be a minister?" I was able to say, "I want it more than anything else in the world." Then he said, "Then, you can do it, but it's going to take a lot of hard work." My mind was made up, so I went on into the seminary. Fortunately, I got a first class speech teacher in Seminary who did a lot to help me undo some bad habits and replace them with good ones. I still slip into some of my old habits in conversation and let my voice drop to a level that somebody can hardly hear. But when it comes to conducting a church service, my voice really booms out. So I think I made the grade in that.
When I was ready to start my senior year in college, World War II was going, and I was getting pretty close to being drafted. I found that I only needed 18 credits to graduate. I had already received a notice from the Belmont Draft Board for a physical exam, so my dad questioned whether I should even try to start my senior year in college. My main reason at that time for trying to start my senior year: there was a language attainment exam offered right at the beginning of the semester. If I could pass that language attainment exam, then one of the hurdles to graduation would be out of the way. I thought I could go and take that test and pass that hurdle. The question was, could I pass the test? I was not properly prepared for it. Dad finally said, "Sam, go ahead and start your senior year, take the test, and then withdraw and get your fees back. If you pass the test, I'll pay your travel expenses from Boston to Madison; if you fail the test, you pay them." It was a deal. I took the test, and I passed it. Then, because I didn't hear anything more from the Draft Board, I said, "Why withdraw? I'm already started." I wouldn't be able to get in 18 credits, but I could get 16. I was signed up for courses that were essential for getting into Seminary. They had sent me a list of college courses that they expected an entering student to have, so I got started with 5 courses. By this time, I was receiving notices from both the Madison and Belmont draft boards, and the two boards got mixed up in their communications with one another. The Madison Draft Board gave me a different kind of a physical test than what the Belmont Draft Board wanted. All of this ate up time and resulted in me getting in my semester. So then the question came, do I start my second semester? I thought I had everything to gain and nothing to lose so I did. Soon after I began, the Draft Board sounded like it was ready to draft me. My parent's minister heard about this and he stormed the Draft Board and said, "You've got no business drafting that guy!" He said, "He's been accepted in Seminary. Seminary students receive deferments." He convinced the Draft Board to leave me alone. I finished college with a Bachelor of Science degree in the School of Education. Then I started Seminary.
SM: Because World War II was such a popular war in the sense that so many men felt that they had an obligation to serve, did you feel any guilt about not serving?
SR: In a sense, yes, but I registered as a conscientious objector, and so I would not have been active. I would have participated in some kind of alternative service.
SM: Could you elaborate on what was behind your application as a conscientious objector?
SR: I don't know if I could do this in a few words. I know that I'm not as close to my thinking on this subject as I was back then, but I simply felt that God had intended that this be a world of peace based upon love. While I could understand that there were forces of evil that threatened our world, and that some pretty strong measures had to be taken to restrain such evil, I also felt that nobody wins a war. We've got to learn to find different solutions.
The more I see around me, the more I think about the orderly world of interdependence that I'm a small part of, and I think of this as happening not by chance but by God using an evolutionary process to manifest conditions facilitating interdependence. Serving others means living a life of interdependence, which is contrary to the thinking that war brings.
I think the thing that probably affects me most deeply is something that's very hard to put into words, Sumner, but I'd like to think and hope that when the final curtain comes down for me, I will hear some divine voice say, "Well done, good and faithful servant."
SM: Have you ever found your interests in the church and birding to be at odds with one another?
SR: I have always tried to put the church career first. To do this through the years when we had WSO conventions that would last a whole weekend, I would stay through a Saturday night banquet and leave for home about 10:00 or 10:30. I might not get home until three or so the next morning and catch a few winks, but I would always be in my place in the pulpit on Sunday morning. I did not miss what I would call my primary responsibility in order to enjoy some bird occasions. And if I had to choose between something that I was expected to do with the church and going to chase a rare bird that had just been spotted, I would put the church first. I think I've been consistent in that all through my ministry.
My feeling in all of the parishes that I have served is that in the first few years I work to strengthen the church and help the lives of individuals. I find for a while that I am successful in reaching new people, but after a while, this tends to level off because the people who are going to respond to my ministry probably have already responded. By and large, it struck me that after about eight years in a parish, it became time to move, not because of any unpleasantness, but because I felt I accomplished most of what I was going to accomplish and that my time could be spent better in a new situation. My replacement might reach people whom I hadn't reached, and so I thought that change every few years was mutually beneficial. And so it turned out that I moved about every eight or nine years.
Today, although retired, I still think that there are church responsibilities I can handle. I have to be delicate about it because I don't want to interfere with the work of our minister in our church. I don't want to present myself as competing with our present minister. I want to be a pew sitter, and I think there are lots of things that pew sitters can do. So I keep on with various kinds of church activities.
In terms of bird work, I think I still can be helpful in some ongoing projects. If I have a chance to promote International Migratory Bird Day, I've tried to do it. I've tried to do something with the Breeding Bird Atlas project, but I feel that I'm not going to improve my skills in bird identification now because my hearing is gradually deteriorating. I think my eyes are a little bit less reliable than they were just a few years ago. Maybe I can still do some kind of original work in analyzing data and presenting some important things. But I don't know that there are many new things for me to try.
Shirley, by the way, has been a great partner throughout all these years. She has her interests, and these are somewhat different from mine. We've learned how to encourage each other in exploring our own interests. We like to talk about things and share them, but any time I go on a field trip, she would probably prefer to stay home. If we're traveling together, she always has a book with her, so that if I stop and see some birds, she'll read her book, while I look at the birds.
Shirley is very much into genealogy, and I have had considerable interest in genealogy, too. Sometimes we go on trips and go to cemeteries and look up stones where some of our ancestors were buried; we've done things like that together. Musically, we've been part of a bell choir. Three of the six people in it are Shirley, our daughter Betsy, and me. I had to give up singing in choir because I don't sustain my breath well enough, but we sang in choirs together for a long, long time, and our church activities have really been some of the main things that we've done together.
SM: What is the secret to your successful marriage?
SR: The fact that we've been in love with each other is a very natural answer to that. But I would point out as I have pointed out to a great many couples, it's one thing to love each other in a face-to-face relationship, and it's much more important to develop a feeling that you love each other because you share the same objectives in life. You have the same hopes and dreams. I think Shirley and I have done that right from the word go. We sensed that we had common objectives and aims in life so that we could say face-to-face, yes, I love you, but more importantly we can say that we love the same goals in life; and we're going to walk together hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm, and heart-in-heart toward these. Inevitably, the time is going to come when one of us is gone. But if you have that sense of direction in life, life doesn't stop when you lose your partner. You continue on toward your life goal. So we discuss this very much with couples that I have married, and we have, Shirley and I, started out that way and we're still doing it.
SM: You mentioned sharing the same life's goal. What is that goal?
SR: Serving God. Trying to practice in this world the principles of love that we think ought to be universal.
SM: You just had your 75th birthday. You recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of your ordination. As you think about these two events, which are very important, how do you view them, and what sort of feeling do you have?
SR: I guess I'd say that they're milestones that encourage you to look back and remember some of the things that occurred in the years before. I do derive enjoyment from remembering things, but I try not to make too much of them because I'm still much more interested in what lies ahead in the future. I had occasion to say this at the 50th anniversary of my ordination. I was expected to say something about what I was feeling at the moment, and I said that I enjoy looking back on things, but my main focus is still on the future. I think that's the way we ought to live our lives.
In March 1997, the University of Wisconsin Press turned to Sam to help revise Owen Gromme's Birds of Wisconsin, which has been unavailable since late 1990. Sam was charged with revising the range maps, time lines indicating when a species is present, and descriptions of status: "Everything on each page that faces the bird paintings." He also wrote a new introduction to the book. The most challenging aspect, however, was making needed changes to bird nomenclature:
"When Gromme began his work in 1941, the fourth edition of the AOU [American Ornithologists' Union] Check-List of North American Birds was in vogue," he recalled. "By the time he completed his work in 1963, the fifth edition was out. Since then, the sixth edition of the Check-List appeared in 1983, with supplements printed subsequently. I found that several bird names - both common and scientific - had to be changed in Gromme's book."
Relying on his Wisconsin Birdlife and Passenger Pigeon issues, Sam completed the project before the September 1997 deadline. The updated and revised book is scheduled to appear in book stores before the end of 1998. "The reissue of Gromme's book gives me great pleasure," he said. "I'm quite thrilled that a whole new generation of birders will have access to it."
Approaching the new millennium, Sam continues to plan birding trips across the state, write articles for The Country Today, participate in the Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas Project and in DNR projects, such as the statewide Black Tern survey, guest lecture at various conservation meetings, counsel and inspire aspiring ornithologists, and, of course, when invited, deliver rousing church sermons to the enthralled faithful.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Chandler Robbins for his review of an early draft of the manuscript. A special thanks is extended to Susi Hickey Nehls for carefully editing the entire draft and for making valuable suggestions to improve the final copy. And, finally, thanks to Shirley Robbins for her hospitality and all the fine tea during those early December mornings.
Sumner W. Matteson
Bureau of Endangered Resources
Department of Natural Resources
P.O. Box 7921
Madison, WI 53707-7921
