A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts

Chapter 9: The Empty Day

116 • Chapter 9 The Empty Day [The Kingbird] is probably one of the best known birds in the state. It is everywhere from early May until September, in forests, in orchards, on prairies, and in the outskirts of towns and cities. —The Birds of Minnesota, 2: 6 In 1889, Thomas Roberts received a letter from a man in Jackson County, in southwestern Minnesota, whom he had not met. The man, Thomas Miller, was a market hunter, one who made a living shooting large numbers of waterfowl—one hundred ducks, easily, in a single morning—and sending them to the East Coast to hang in butcher shops or grace the linen-clad tables of fancy restaurants. Miller lived on the edge of a vast shallow lake that teemed, he wrote, with birds: white pelicans and Trumpeter Swans, Whooping and Sandhill Cranes, and thousands of ducks. The wetlands were a stopover for untold numbers of migrating birds, particularly shorebirds ,includingtheEskimoCurlew.TherewasalargeBlack-crownedNightHeron colony, for which the lake was named, and incredible numbers of Franklin’s Gulls. “If you can spare the time you ought to visit,” Miller wrote. “You would see a sight well worth going a long way to see.”1 But it was not easy for the young physician to get away in 1889. He was thirty-one years old, he had been in practice two years, he was a new father, and his wife was pregnant again. His duty lay in building his practice, especially with another baby on the way. Miller had not contacted Roberts out of the blue. Roberts had written him earlier, sending him a copy of a report issued by the Geological and Natural History Survey and asking if hewould documentbirdsin the Heron Lake region. Did Miller feel well versed enough to do that? Miller replied that he knew waterbirds intimately but had only recently begun identifying The Empty Day 117 land birds. But his letter indicated that he was a very close observer and that the bird life was abundant in the area. In the following months, Roberts became a father again, his own father succumbed to tuberculosis, and he settled John’s financial affairs, securing thewelfareofhismotherandsister.Anotherbabyappeared,thethirdinfour years;the familymoved,andthemedicalpracticeburgeoned.Therewasjust not time for birds. In 1892, Philo Hatch, Roberts’s former mentor, authored Notes on the Birds of Minnesota, a clothbound, substantial-looking book that belied the term “notes.”2 At first glance, it seemed that Hatch had usurped Roberts’s dream of writing the definitive book on Minnesota birds. Hatch had been asked many years before, when he had been considered the foremost authority, to write a report on Minnesota’s birds for the state’s Natural History Survey. Roberts had been a boy then. He had always liked Hatch (his ebullient personality was infectious), but even as a boy Roberts had recognized that Hatch’s record keeping left much to be desired. Hatch had delayed the report to the survey many times. He had an active medical practice, and the survey had not pressed for his report, being more interested in the prospects of iron ore mining in northern Minnesota. Hatch had published a couple of briefly annotated lists before 1892, but his final contribution was submitted after he had retired to California, poor in health and resources. By this time he had lost most of his notes and compiled his bird list from memory. When the report appeared, Roberts realized that many of Hatch’s observations were “largely fictitious” and “the result of confusion of data.” So did the head of the Natural History Survey, Henry Nachtrieb. Nachtrieb, Roberts’s old friend from his land examiner days, had returned to Minnesota and taken a teaching position at the university. When he became the departmental head of Animal Biology, he assumed the role of head of the Natural History Survey as well. Nachtrieb wrote the introduction to Hatch’s erroneous report and tried to distance himself from it. He declared to the university’s board of regents, to whom the report was addressed, that he had “not assumed any editorial responsibilities and privileges, but simply those as a transmitter.”3 He added The Empty Day 118 inhis introductionthatareport onthestate’sbirdswasunder wayandwould soon be published. To Roberts, Nachtrieb wrote that “Our good Dr. Hvoslef [a meticulous ornithologist from Lanesboro, Minnesota] is very much cut up by Hatch’s treatment of his [Hvoslef’s] careful observations. I tried...