ENHS Nature Trails May 2005 Article 1

This month's speaker: Bob Fleming

My job as editor is really getting easy. This month I'm going to let our speaker, Bob Fleming, introduce himself to you, by sharing the note he sent me in an e-mail with his bio attached. He sent the note on Tuesday, not quite two days since he had returned from the Himalayas (12 hours ahead of us):

"Had a fine time in the Himalayas where I was a resource person with group working on conservation issues. One memorable afternoon was spent trying to get our two-wheel drive jeep over a 14,000' pass covered in snow. Actually we had two jeeps, but one broke down so all seven of us piled into one jeep. Fortunately, this was enough muscle power to help push the jeep uphill in a particularly slippery spot, and also to assist in keeping the vehicle on the road bed; It was a relief to get into Tawang, 10,300', that evening!"

And now his bio:

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

Earliest memories involve travel and nature. In the Indian location where my parents were assigned, winter snow occasionally accumulated to a depth of one to two feet. And as there was no central heating, most humans moved to lower elevations. Our family followed this pattern.

During the cold season we took off for about two months, each year selecting a different part of India where we would spend the entire sixty days, based in the proximity of forest (where my father collected bird and other specimens for the Field Museum of Natural History) and a clinic or hospital (where my mother could help by relieving a local doctor). Thus, some of my earliest memories are of the noise and grit of travel by stream engine trains and horse cart transfers to "bungalows," where evening illumination was often by kerosene-fired "hurricane" lanterns, and nights found us tucked under mosquito nets. Then there were the forests filled with wonderful birds, and where, mostly in my imagination, dangerous animals lurked.

Thus I grew up, in part, in an atmosphere of exploration and collection (gathering museum specimens). An early memory, about age seven, involved being allowed to prepare my first bird specimen. Embarrassingly, while skinning a white-cheeked bulbul, I 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, mostly with tails attached. These specimens are now in the Field Museum.

Early memories are also of insects, especially butterflies and beetles. In this context I still clearly remember a neighbor, a butterfly enthusiast, escorting a rowdy group of us (I was about ten), 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. Members of the Society and readers of Nature Trails will recognize the last name. 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, now in Alaska, was a close companion.

Following high school I traveled to Michigan to go through the liberal arts program at Albion College and later specialized in zoology at Michigan State University, finishing my Ph.D. 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 where 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 rattlesnakes and other serpents--I never saw any of them before he did except once in the rainforest of Sinaloa, when I placed my hand on a boa constrictor while attempting to tie a tent rope to an overhanging branch.

In 1968 I moved to Kathmandu to assist my father in coauthoring The Birds of Nepal. Dad had been collecting data on the birds of Nepal since 1949 and I had assisted from time to time, but this information was not generally available. We thought a field guide might stimulate an interest in Nepalese birds and in their conservation. The book finally appeared in 1976.

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, other regions of Asia, Africa and Oceania.

My wife Linda and I moved from Kathmandu to the McKenzie Valley in February, 1985. We found the climate of the Pacific Northwest appealing 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 Eugene Natural History Society. Twenty years later we know we made the right decision.

From our base in the McKenzie Valley I have had access to many areas of the world. And although I had spent considerable time in the southern hemisphere, I had never seen a penguin in the wild until reaching New Zealand's South Island, the home of three penguin species. What a thrill to see these birds! However, this was little compared with the impact I later felt while walking through penguin and seal colonies on islands in the Southern Ocean and on the Antarctica shelf.

On Friday the 20th we will travel to the Falklands and South Georgia where the natural history is amazing, and then to Elephant Island, made famous by Shackleton survivors, and finally to the Antarctic peninsula for a look at penguins, seals, sheathbills, carrion-feed ducks, and other residents of the deep south.

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