John Hall Sage—an unknown name; unknown, long
forgotten, even in his native Connecticut, and even though his contributions to
the ornithology of his state were epic. A
founding member of the venerable American Ornithologists Union, its secretary
for decades and even its president, he in an era in which quantitative was an alien
term collected data—dates, locations, sexes, measurements, notes about the
specimens he collected—hundreds of them, thousands even.
And that is how I know him—from late at night, night
after night and even into the early morning, in the bowels of the University of
Connecticut’s collection room, amidst the overpowering scent of mothballs, alone
with his catalogs, with his details about birds. My fingers repeatedly brushed across his
handwritten records, with hands holding the pages he had held, unfolding the
notes he tucked among the pages, reading the records scrawled across the back
of his daughter’s 1912 wedding invitation.
In this place of silent contemplation, he had become a friend of sorts,
someone I knew, separated only by that troublesome quantity of time. His catalogs spanned fifty years, and fifty
years hence I learned from what he had learned as I prepared for my first
season along his adored Connecticut River.
It was a place which it appeared had slipped into oblivion after his
time, without any further long-term study of its inhabitants. Likewise, his irreplaceable collection had
been relegated to a basement where it sat ignored before being rescued just
before I came to use it. I have wondered
if he considered whether anyone would again have the constitution to take up
the quest he had begun.
Now it is another fifty years hence as I prepare for my next
season in that transcendent place, that singular landscape where, as it broods
in the first breaths of an approaching day, time for a time suspends and its
essence is returned to those whose tenure here far predate ours—those
of bright voice, of exuberant constitution, of unparalleled loveliness. When I began my studies, I somewhere wrote
down that I would have to grow old to understand the sorts of questions that
filled my head. And, indeed, as old age
and slipping vision envelops me, there does seem to be some inkling of an
answer: much of what we think we know we don’t, what we see over the short term
is illusion, the immutably integrated is not so but fluid. The relationships, the interactions, all that
we see, none of them remain the same. As
I also wrote to myself, the river I studied was rather an enigma, flowing
continuously like time, taking what was new down its course, turning it from
young to old, and then releasing it from material bonds. From there, we cannot know what becomes of
such things—once young, then old, and then free.
Sage in his collecting focused especially on the tidelands
of the Connecticut River but he did not stop there. He was as well intimately familiar with the
birds dwelling within the limited tracts of forest present in Connecticut’s
late nineteenth century landscape—the forest in all of its
manifestations from early successional through mature. He chronicled its birds, considered their
distributions, their abundances, how these changed over the years of his
observation and how what he saw fit into his friend C. Hart Merriam’s life zone
concept.
So too, I realized that during my tenure I must do much the
same. By the beginning in the 1980s, I
began to quantify using the techniques of the era how it was that the birds of
the forest configured themselves. I
expanded my horizons by taking my forest studies to the other side of the
planet before, by the beginning of the 2000s, I embarked on long-term
investigations of forest birds throughout Connecticut, summer and winter, now fully
a century since Sage’s initial work—work that encompassed tens of thousands
of observations and tens of thousands of measurements.
A small subset of these measures examined a thirty-five-year
span in an expansive managed forest in a region, corresponding roughly with the
southern boundary of Merriam’s Canadian zone, with bird communities predicted
to be particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change. This work demonstrated that bird community
changes indeed did show some relationships to Connecticut’s warming climate,
but not always,
and often trends were opposite to expectations.
Similarly, community change showed a fair number of connections
with changing vegetation conditions—wildlife management 101—but not
always and trends were often opposite to expectations.
When using more sophisticated protocols over twenty years in Connecticut’s
largely unmanaged, aging and more expansive Northeast Upland ecoregion, portions
of which flirted with old growth conditions, these same sorts of patterns
appeared, with changing climate and maturing forests appearing related to a
good deal of bird community change, but again many of the changes were contrary
to expectations. Some of these contrary
patterns might have been related to larger continental phenomena, but what I suspected
most was that I was observing evolution in real time. Species typically associated with
successional landscapes were exploding into mature forests; those once
associated with remote core forests were becoming lawn birds. Species that at the beginning of my studies
were absent were now the commonest birds in the forest. Still others were inexplicably disappearing
in conditions that should have favored them.
In short, nature appeared more complicated than we might wish it to be;
it was a moving target.
Once some time back I took a private trip to Sage’s still
stately home near the Connecticut River to seek out whatever of him might still
remain there. While sitting at that spot
I said to him, just in case he might hear me, “John, you know, it’s just you
and me. I don’t know that anyone else
would ever want to do this. It’s too
hard, the personal cost too great and I’m not sure that it matters much to
anyone but us. In any event, maybe in
the not-too-distant future this is a conversation we can have together. Until then, John, rest well.”
