One of the unique things about the Hummingbird Exhibit at Philadelphia Zoo was that the way the exhibit was planted. It had a wonderful collection of plants and they were plants that were obviously all tropical but the selection of plants seemed to fit the ambience much better than at… Read More
Now, speaking of publications. In 2007, you wrote about the use of tropical plants in bird exhibits at the Philadelphia Zoo. Read More
Can you talk a little about that?… Read More
The old group, shouldn’t say that, the old timers, the individuals who’d been in for a long time didn’t necessarily share information very well. I think the generation that mine and since, has been more about let’s share information, it will serve us all better. And as a result, I… Read More
Who instilled with you the of sense of you need to publish?… Read More
I guess I was taught at KU by E Raymond Hall about publishing. And I think in academia, it’s a publish or perish kind of a thing. I remember the first thing that I prepared for him in terms of a publication on black-tailed prairie dogs. He got a little… Read More
I think the projects, particularly for terms of publishing were just opportune. In other words, this is something we need to work with and you worked with it. I don’t know that I really sat down and gave a lot of thought to like, I need to work, I need… Read More
It’s what you personally wanted to do or were you told to do certain things?… Read More
I would publish and Gus would publish, we’d publish about how to breed such and such or how to manage a hummingbird collection, stuff like that. That was in spare time. A lot of things were done at home at night. Read More
Were you allowed to pick the projects that you wanted to learn about or publish?… Read More
I think my workload at Philadelphia, if I try to remember back on what was a typical day, I was the one who was responsible for checking out the bird collection every morning. I tried to visit every exhibit we had. Now, the zoo had just constructed the Elmer S… Read More
Some other passerines, tropical tanagers, stuff like that. And so, my job was I had to go in the hummingbird exhibit obviously, every morning and we had individual feeders hanging. And so, this feeder was for this hummingbird, that’s his territory. And this feeder is for this humming, that’s his… Read More
Well, it sounds like you had the opportunity for a lot of unique learning experiences or were you also assigned as an assistant curator, just the basic work that no one else wanted to do or Gus didn’t want to do?… Read More
And we were writing a lot of the things that was happening. It was all new stuff, certainly reproduction with hummingbirds and reproduction with… The zoo one of the largest waterfowl collections in the world. And so, we were breeding things that hadn’t been bred before and that went not… Read More
There may have been one other, maybe Frank Todd. We were the youth at that time. So, it was a lot of pioneering was done then. Read More
Yes, definitely. The collection at the Philadelphia Zoo far surpassed that of the Kansas City Zoo, so the learning opportunity was there. It was very good. And it was just a matter of me taking advantage of that opportunity. We had birds that the Kansas City Zoo would never have… Read More
Things that I’ve probably forgotten a lot of but he always had answers very quick because he had the expedition experience. And I don’t know of any other bird curator ever in this business, who had the expedition experience that Gus Griswold had ’cause he did that for the universities,… Read More
So, the words that Roger Conant said to you about being the small frog in the big pond and growing, were you learning things about birds that you couldn’t have learned in the other zoo, now at this zoo that you were maturing?… Read More
Wow, haven’t thought about that. Gus was a very prim and proper person. In fact, if you looked at Gus, you’d thought he was an English professor. He wore the tweed jacket and everything and that’s the type of persona he projected. But I don’t know that there were really… Read More
And then he brought a camera that he’d had in Borneo, (laughs) which took lousy pictures. He just was a man of tradition. And if I was gonna think of anything funny, it was just that Gus didn’t really step up to a lot of new things very easily. And… Read More