I recently had a chance to go through an old ledger containing a
handwritten catalog of over 500 bird specimens collected over the late
nineteenth century by one Carl Tuttle, a physician of Berlin Heights
(Erie County), Ohio. He seems to have been a connoisseur and well-off,
with some leisure time despite being a farmer as well as a saw-bones. He
offers an introduction, which ends this way: "There is something
particularly charming to me about a finely mounted bird which falls
little short of adoration, beside the comfort that it has given me in
studying the habits and form of birds and in forming a fairly good
private collection. May they call forth admiration long after I have
hung up my gun forever, from those that no other chase than that of the
mighty dollar and who also have never found by experience that: 'there
is a pleasure in the pathless woods.'" Near the end of his life he
donated his collection to Bowling Green State University.
        He had collected quite a few birds in Erie County. In the early days he
shot many himself, and locals, who usually sought payment from the
squire, brought them. By the mid-'90s he branched out, purchasing choice
skins by mail from California, Texas, even South America. He did a lot
of collecting himself farther afield in Florida. In the spring of 1896
he spent a week in Branford, then three weeks near the even smaller burg
of Old Town, collecting birds in Lafayette Co, mostly the usual Florida
endemics. He shot a Bachman's warbler there on 3/15/1896, wondering how
this, the only one he'd ever seen, had been so difficult to find.
Apparently during the time he spent there in March of 1896 he also made
the acquaintance of one Joe J. Johnson.
        By the end of the century ivory-bills were well known to be very rare,
and naturally many bird-lovers of the day were especially anxious to
procure them. Remember there were no gorgeous photos of this bird
available to bird fanciers, and because field optics were pretty
primitive the only way to get a really good look was to shoot them and
before they decayed prepare them more or less permanently, preferably as
mounts that resembled most the living bird. That way, they could be
ogled forever.
        Anyway, Dr. Tuttle had apparently had unsatisfactory glimpses of
ivory-bills in the large primitive California Swamp area of the county.
Tanner, the species' most famous biographer, later visited the Swamp and
estimated it contained about six pairs in sixty square miles. Possibly
this wild country was too challenging half a century earlier, so Tuttle
must have engaged Johnson to procure specimens for him.
        Johnson, penetrating on horseback far into the heart of the Swamp,
collected five ivorybills for Tuttle in 1896, a mated pair and a single
bird in March, and another pair in June. The only hint as to how much
Tuttle paid him for these trophies is "$6.50" inscribed on a recent tag.
The doctor entered details into his Catalog: the single bird was shot
along Fish-Bone Creek in a burned area on the 23rd, whereupon Johnson's
"darky" brought the bird ten miles back to Tuttle. As for the pair
procured on the 30th, the female was feeding on a magnolia, then fled
and was shot when she flew to a sweet gum; the male was feeding on an
elm stump about four feet from the ground, then flew to a dead pine
where he too was shot. They were said to be "exceedingly rare and wary."
The June 16th pair were feeding high up in dead pines when discovered.
        Tuttle kept his promise. Before his death he bequeathed these specimens
to an educational institution. In the fullness of time two --and I
suspect three--of them (the evidence is not conclusive), ended up at the
OSU Museum, where I looked at them this morning. The tags have
information on them that Tuttle didn't have: Woody Goodpaster had
relaxed the mounted specimens, and made them into round skins for the
scientific collection, and they had passed through the E. L. Moseley
collection at BGSU. On the other hand, the new tags don't make it clear
that mated pairs were involved, or their habitat and dietary choices, or
the name of the collector.
        We are unlikely to see ivory-bills again except in this still form,
laced with arsenic trioxide, lying in a dark steel drawer.  As he
intended, Tuttle's birds survived in some form beyond their mortal span,
and it probably never occurred to him that all their kin were to reach
the end of theirs soon after he'd hung up his gun. He quotes Byron in
his introduction to the catalog, whose verses continue:
        I love not man the less, but Nature more,
        From these our interviews, in which I steal
        From all I may be, or have been before,
        To mingle with the Universe, and feel
        What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
Bill Whan
Columbus

______________________________________________________________________

Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society.
Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.
Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/.

You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS
Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]