Bill, don't wait until your dotage to transcribe those correspondence - do it now while you have your wits about you. I'm sure you have listened to people who have 'reached their dotage' talk about things that never happened but which are clear as a bell in their mind today! Besides, people will argue with you today - which is a good thing because it suggests they take you seriously. When you 'reach your dotage' they will just smile and ignore you while feeding you your apple sauce (my nephew's favorite expression, not mine)!
Matt Valencic
Geauga County - where we would love to see a Baikal Teal and/or Black-throated Sparrow, not to mention an Eskimo Curlew.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ohio birds [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bill Whan
Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2015 2:12 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [Ohio-birds] Trautman and Peterson
Just a bit of disconnected history that might be of interest. Milton Trautman and Roger Tory Peterson forged a friendship, and wrote back and forth for years. Most of these documents are in the OSU Archives, but I haven't dug into many of them. Here is part of one characteristic early letter about the Ohio list from MBT to RTP on 12/17/1962:
"Borror (1950) adds twenty species which formerly occurred in Ohio and have long been accepted as Ohio birds, but of which there are no specimens, or of species about which there is some doubt. This includes:
trumpeter swan, man o'war bird, swallow-tailed kite, whooping crane, long-billed curlew, Eskimo curlew, black-necked stilt, gull-billed tern, roseate tern, Louisiana parakeet, Bohemian waxwing, red-cockaded woodpecker. Recent sight records that appear to be rather reliable:
prairie falcon (banded and released by Lynds Jones), sharp-tailed grouse (unsuccessfully introduced), little gull (several sight records), great gray owl (seen by me on Starve Island), Audubon's warbler (for a while reported almost yearly by Clevelanders), Baird's sandpiper (seen by me at SBI [actually collected by MBT there on 4/15/56, now OSUM #9420, despite Peterjohn's 2001 statement that "there are no spring records documented by specimens"]). Also sight records
for: Elliot's pheasant (an escaped bird was collected), Reeve's pheasant (many introduced), Baikal teal (I saw it, consider it an escape?), black swan (I saw it flying on Lake Erie with whistling swans), black-throated sparrow. So to be conservative the Ohio list is "approximately 340,"
including the Boh Waxwing and Eskimo C. By accepting most sight records, it would be approximately 350."
Trautman and Peterson had a lengthy correspondence about the behavior of birds migrating over Lake Erie, and probably other ones curated in the OSU Archives; maybe when I reach my dotage I'll transcribe them.
Bill Whan
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Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.
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