Ann Arbor Rendezvous

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W.B. Mershon's personal rail car on a hunting expedition to North Dakota in the 1890s (Courtesy of Geneology Collection of Saginaw [Michigan

Earlier I wrote of my trip to Saginaw to examine the papers of William Butts Mershon, who among many other things was the first great historian of the passenger pigeon. He loved the out of doors, and pursued hunting and fishing with all the vast resources at his disposal. He was a self-admitted “game hog”, back in the day when few people knew any better. He bought a railroad car and took it on hunting trips; this photo depicts such an outing to North Dakota. (The photo is used with permission of the Public Libraries of Saginaw, MI, Local History and Genealogical Collection). But when it became clear that  the profligate slaughter engaged in by “sportsmen” and market hunters alike was ridding the country of its wildlife, he became a passionate proponent of conservation measures. (In fact, many of those involved in the last-minute effort to save the passenger pigeons from extinction had a history of shooting them.)

Well it turns out that most of Mershon’s papers are not in Saginaw, but rather at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (I accidentally learned that fact in the course of perusing a 1954 doctoral dissertation.) So that is where I headed recently. It only took me three and a half hours to get there, and the motel was only five minutes from the library.

One of the pleasures of this ppigeon project has been the people I have encountered in my searches for information. Don Gorney is a birding friend who lives in Indianapolis and likes the historical aspect of natural history. (Several weeks ago, I stayed at his home and he accompanied me to Bloomington, IN where we spent a day combing the files of Amos Butler, the father of Indiana ornithology.) It turns out his sister Terry is also a very accomplished genealogist and nature historian. She has provided me some excellent ppigeon accounts that she has unearthed in her research. I casually asked if she wanted to spend a day doing research in Ann Arbor (she lives in Ft. Wayne) and it turned out she was able to join me. So we were set to meet at the library when it opened on Monday morning.

The trip to Ann Arbor also provided the opportunity to meet a friend of longstanding whom I have not seen in well over a decade. Darlene Friedman, a birder who grew up on the north side of Chicago, is a veterinarian who lives about twenty miles from Ann Arbor. We met at my motel and then had dinner at a neat place called Zingerman’s, which at its roots is a Jewish deli but whose capacious shelves and coolers now hold numerous olive oils, cheeses, and other comestibles desired by today’s cosmopolitan gourmet.

Darlene has been an avid birder since I first met her in June 1973 (some day I will go into my spiel on the rarity of young female birders). She is a serious state lister but over the last couple of years has devoted a lot of effort to photography. That seems to be a common development among birders. Once you have seen just about all there is in your area, your emphasis changes. If you have the resources, you can chase birds all over the world. Or you go in the other direction and become a county lister like my friend Andy Sigler. Some folks are captivated by temporal lists, most particularly one’s annual total or big days. Especially with the forgiving medium of digital cameras, many like Darlene have become serious photographers. Another local birder, Donnie Dann, devotes a lot of his time to conservation issues. My birding has also changed over the decades. I have a greater interest in broader natural history and I obviously am enthralled by ecological changes, particularly those wrought by people.

The white-winged crossbill invasion last winter is a perfect example of how different birding orientations manifested themselves. Andy and his fellow county listers searched the internet, seeking the locations of central Illinois cemeteries- a land use type likely to have conifers, the required food of the crossbills. At one place, Andy and Mike Baum sat by a cemetery looking and listening for a good long while, and were ready to leave when Mike heard something fall from a tree. It was a chewed up cone, and further scanning yielded the crossbill. Darlene, on other hand, spent many hours in places that she knew hosted the crossbills and took many hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures, including the beauty that appears here.

Crane Creek in northwest Ohio is a location Darlene targets often, in that it affords wonderful opportunities to photograph the myriad of migrants that have given the site a national reputation. In fact, she laments the growing crowds of birders, who make effective photography more challenging. But you can see by the results, it remains a terrific spot. One evening was hardly enough to catch up on so many years, but we did resolve to keep in touch on a regular basis (hopefully, that will be more than my constant noodging for blog photos).

Bright and early Monday, I was in the parking lot of the Bentley Library waiting for it to open, when a car with IN plates pulled in next to me. It was Terry and we hit it off immediately. (Indeed, several times during the day, we were admonished (some what unfairly we, think) by librarians to keep our voices down) There were many boxes of Mershon’s material, which you order one at a time. Ten or so boxes contained “letter books”, an early attempt at making copies. As I understand it, typed letters were pressed onto special onion skin-like paper that held the writing. The other boxes contained other kinds of material, including letters sent to him. Terry started looking at the box that covered the years he began researching his 1907 ppigeon book. I began with the letter books, and despaired that it would take probably weeks to go through them all. But after a few hours, being the highly observant individual I am, I noticed lettered tabs at the end of the volume. Could it be? Yes, next to each tab were the names of the various people to whom he sent letters and the page on which it appeared. They were indexed! So what was going to take forever was now doable in hours.

The specific thing we were looking for was correspondence between Mershon and Henry B. Roney, the music teacher who visited the last great pigeon nesting in 1878 in Petoskey, MI in order to stop the killing. Both men lived in Saginaw at the time,  and I strongly suspect Mershon helped finance Roney’s mission. Soon thereafter, however, Roney, moved to Chigago, where he worked as a music director for a large church and then organized his boy’s choir that traveled the world to great aclaim. I wondered if they kept in touch and whether Roney retained his interest in conservation. Terry hit pay dirt first- finding a letter from Roney, with its distinctive letterhead promoting the choir. A brief correspondence ensued, sparked by Mershon’s request for a copy of Roney’s article on the Petoskey nesting. I found a few letters that Mershon wrote, and was confident that by the following day I would have been able to complete the letterbooks (the other boxes, I was forgoing). Terry returned to Fort Wayne, and I headed back to the motel fully expecting to finish up the next day. Unfortunately, the threat of bad weather prompted me to cut my trip short.  But another excursion is in the offiing.

White-winged crossbill photographed by Darlene Friedman.

American redstart at Crane Creek State Park (OH) in May 2008 photographed by Darlene Friedman.

          

Tags: Ann Arbor, boys choir, Henry B. Roney, W.B. Mershon, white-winged crossbill