ENHS Nature Trails December 2002 Article 1

This month's speaker: Robert Fleming

I do not remember a time when I was not interested in the beauty and excitement of nature. There is no question that this was due to the influence of my parents.

My formative years we spent in India where my parents, under the Methodist Church, were involved with education and medicine at Woodstock, an international Christian school located at 1980m/ 6,500' in the western Himalayas.

The third word in my vocabulary, I am told, was "puddy," a strange utterance for an infant. However, my father often took me into the garden and held me--when I weighed less than I do now--in front of various flowers while saying "pretty." Thus I had little chance of not being interested in nature; in addition the beauty of wildflowers has always held a special fascination for me.

In the 1930's and 1940's my father, while working on his Ph.D. in education at the University of Chicago, occasionally relaxed at the nearby Field Museum. While there he met the curator of birds and eventually was invited to collect specimens for the institution. He returned to India with little experience but considerable zeal.

Thus I grew up in an atmosphere of gathering museum specimens; we always seemed to be looking for special species. The latter were primarily birds, but they also included small mammals, reptiles, and plants. An early memory: at about seven years of age I was allowed to prepare my first bird specimen, but while skinning the White-cheeked Bulbul, I embarrassingly pulled the tail completely off. Fortunately things improved, and by the time I completed high school in India, I had a collection of some 800 birds--most with tails attached. These are now in the Field Museum.

Early memories are not only of birds. I was also keen on insects, especially butterflies and beetles. In this context, when I was about 10, I still clearly remember a neighbor, a butterfly enthusiast, escorting a rowdy group of us on a camping trip to the "Pumping Station." The latter was one of three sites in the Himalayas where over 100 species of butterflies had been seen (collected?) in one day. Our mentor in this case was a special person by the name of Paul Wagner. (Readers of Nature Trails will recognize the last name as Paul was the father of our well-known David Wagner.) In those early years David was far too young to tag along with us, but David's oldest brother, Bob, was a close companion.

Following high school, I arrived in southern Michigan to go through the liberal arts program at Albion College and later specialized in zoology at Michigan State University, finishing my PhD in 1967. Professors at Albion and MSU were wonderful. One standout was Rollin Baker, a professor of zoology and director of the University's Natural History Museum. One summer he led a team of us to Mexico; we traveled in a truck converted to collecting needs and spent nearly two months mostly in Durango and Sinaloa. Prof Baker and one student "did" mammals, another gathered snakes, while two of us were the "bird team." Among other things, I was amazed how Webb, the herpetology student, could find rattle and other snakes--I never saw any of them before he did except for one boa constrictor on which I placed my hand while attempting to tie a tent rope to an overhanging branch in the rain forest.

In 1968 I moved to Kathmandu to assist my father in coauthoring a Field Guide to the Birds of Nepal. Dad had been collecting data on birds of Nepal since 1949, and I had assisted from time to time, but the information was not generally available to others. We thought a field guide might stimulate an interest in Nepalese birds and in their conservation.

Back in 1968 we still had a number of gaps in our coverage of the country, so besides working on the text and training and supervising Nepalese artists, we continued with our collecting surveys, the longest of which was a 51 day trek around Dhaulagiri to examine the Tibetan-like territory found north of that mountain. On that expedition we noted remarkable numbers of surprisingly tame Blue Sheep, Pseudovis nayaur, and relayed this information to mammalogist George Schaller who later organized an expedition to study these "sheep;" the Snow Leopard, a well-received book by Peter Mattheissen, summarized that outing.

In 1970 I joined a Massachusetts Audubon "Around the World" tour as a local guide and resource person for their South Asia sojourn and found that I greatly enjoyed sharing "my" part of Asia with fellow nature enthusiasts. Since then I have been involved in natural history tours and conservation consultancies in various parts of the Himalayas as well as other regions of Asia, Africa and Oceania. But my first love has always been the natural history of the world's most stunning geological feature.

The first edition of our field guide appeared in 1976 and went through three editions. It has now been out of print for many years as I burned out on the revising and updating of the material. Fortunately, a number of well trained Nepalese zoologists are now busy compiling a significant record for their country.

My wife Linda and I moved from Kathmandu to the Shangri La neighborhood of the McKenzie Valley in February,1985. At the time we had few Oregon connections but found that the climate of the Pacific Northwest appealed to us, and after looking over various Northwest possibilities, we felt that the Eugene area had everything we wanted, including the U. of O. with an herbarium headed by David Wagner, the Hult Center, and the Natural History Society. Seventeen years later we know we made the right decision; there is no place in the country that equals the combination found here in the southern Willamette Valley.

Be that as it may, on Friday the 13th we journey to the Himalayas, where, using birds and other natural history examples, I plan to illustrate the great biodiversity of these marvelous mountains for the Eugene Natural History Society and its guests.

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