The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation: Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy

9. Vertebrate Studies

135                        9 Vertebratestudies The founders of Tall Timbers, Beadel, Stoddard, and the Komareks, were all-around naturalists, but their focus was on vertebrates. Beadel and Stoddard were bird men, and the Komareks, while capable with birds, were primarily mammalogists. Their early-twentieth-century training emphasized faunal (and floral) surveys to discover the composition and communities of species found in a region. In many sections, as in the South, biotic distribution was still poorly known even by the 1950s, because serious, knowledgeable biologists were thinly spread. As Jack Rudloe has noted, the first inclination of these scientists, especially the Komareks, was “to inventory and describe the life within a hundred mile radius to the station” (Rudloe 1968). For Tall Timbers, inventory and monitoring of biota has always been important. What species are present? Why are some seemingly suitable species apparently missing? What species are decreasing or increasing, disappearing or arriving? Are these changes natural or not? In the Red Hills, anomalies occurred with the near-disappearance of skunks (Mephitis); the appearance ofRedFoxes(Vulpes fulva),Coyotes(Canis latrans),Nine-bandedArmadillos(Dasypus novemcinctus), and Cattle Egrets; and the nest-parasite Brown-headed Cowbird’s recent expansion of its breeding range. The impacts of such changes on species already present may be profound—for example, armadillos eating the eggs of snakes and competing with tortoises for burrows. * * * W. Wilson Baker and Harriett Knowles1 were called the “first full-time employees” of Tall Timbers when they were hired in October 1966. Nick Fallier and Thomas Quick, who had been hired before that, were not full time. Fallier was a World War II pilot who kept up his license to fly and was recruited by Stoddard for aerial surveys for the Ivory-billedWoodpecker.He continuedhisassociationwithTallTimbersinother ways, including scuba diving in local rivers for fossils and Indian artifacts. Thomas Quick was the son of Dewey Quick, who looked after the Heard’s Pond unit of Greenwood Plantation , and thus came to the attention of the Komareks. Quick was the office secretary 136 · Part II. Ecological Research and Outreach until he was replaced by Harriett Knowles, a New Jersey native and an efficient veteran office worker of the U.S. Army. Harriett worked at Tall Timbers through 1986, first as the station secretary and then as Ed Komarek’s primary assistant in the offices of Tall Timbers Research, Inc. The chief duty of Dr. Robert A. Norris, who worked at Tall Timbers from 1962 to 1966, was to assist Herbert Stoddard in his work to document the WCTV tower bird kills. In addition, Norris pursued his own studies of the serology of avian blood to explore the possibilitythatblood-groupantigenscouldshedlightonspeciesor other taxonomic hierarchies in birds. Norris netted birds for his samples and harmlessly took a few drops of blood before releasing them; he also used freshly killed birds from the WCTV tower. Norris’s work was pioneering but inconclusive; it would require more elaborate techniques like those used by Alvan Karlin later at Tall Timbers (see below) to elucidate the biochemical clues Norris was seeking. W. Wilson Baker was the first trained biologist Tall Timbers hired specifically to work on station projects instead of assisting Stoddard, as was the case with Norris. Baker was born on April 17, 1940, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and attended the Westtown School near Philadelphia, the oldest coed prep school in the United States. He then went to EarlhamCollegeinRichmond,Indiana,wherehecameunder theinfluenceofDr.James B. Cope of Earlham’s biology department. Cope was an old-school naturalist with wideranging interests, but his mammalogist’s eye was especially focused on bats.2 Baker was drawn to bats but had a keen interest in birds as well. After graduating from Earlham in 1962, Baker went to the University of Georgia’s Forestry School for his master’s-level work on the distribution of bats in north Georgia. While working on his degree there and for a year after finishing, Baker participated in a figure 9.1. Harriett (Knowles) Atkinson, March 1975. Photo courtesy of Phil Ashler. Vertebrate Studies · 137 rabies survey for the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study and the Georgia Public Health Service. Baker and others traveled the back roads of Georgia trapping carnivorous mammals for blood samples and acquiring along the way an exceptionally thorough knowledge of Georgia’s counties and small towns. In 1966, during the year after Baker completed his MS degree, while he was trapping for the rabies survey, Ed Komarek...