Pioneers of Bird Records - 1867 to 1970

Background

New-Jersey-born ornithologist and nephew of Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mailliard’s family moved to California in early 1868, arriving in San Francisco via Panama on the steamer Henry Chauncey. In 1873 they settled in Marin County. Mailliard’s early education was at the hands of a governess, and as a boy, he began collecting birds’ eggs on their Rancho San Geronimo. When he left for the University of California at Berkeley he passed his egg collection on to his brother, John Ward Mailliard, who “improved it.”

Joseph Mailliard was appointed Honorary Curator of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences, and soon thereafter, Curator. He was 62 years old. He retired as active curator in 1927 at age 70, but remained active into his 80s. Mailliard died at age 88 on December 12, 1945.

https://www.islapedia.com/index.php?title=MAILLIARD,_Joseph

Background

Born in Kansas in 1884, Dixon spent his first years near Galena, Cherokee County, Kansas. 1In 1888, the Dixon family relocated to California. After graduating from Escondido High School, Dixon attended Throop Polytechnic Institute (now the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech) in Pasadena, where he began his training in biological fieldwork. At Throop, Dixon took a biology course with a young instructor named Joseph Grinnell, forming a mentorship and professional association that would last many years. While still a student at Throop, Dixon was recommended by Frank Stephens, an expert specimen collector who Dixon knew from an ornithological club, to be a bird collector for Annie Montague Alexander.

Alexander established and financed the University of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at Berkeley, and named Grinnell as the founding director in 1908. Dixon joined Grinnell at MVZ soon-after and began his graduate studies there. Throughout his career with both MVZ and NPS, Dixon was an avid photographer. He had the opportunity to showcase several of his photographs of wildlife produced while working for both institutions in the government publication Wildlife Portfolio of the Western National Parks (1942). Dixon was also a productive writer, having many of his articles published in professional journals, especially in The Condor, an international journal devoted to research of the biology of bird species.

Greatly admired by his students and colleagues in Yosemite, Dixon was considered a pioneer in wildlife research and one of the most experienced field surveyors and collectors of his time.

The Joseph S. Dixon Collection contains photographic documentation created or collected by Dixon during his career as a naturalist, field biologist, mammologist, wildlife biologist, educator and photographer and some field notes.

https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/upload/dixon.pdf

Background

Joseph Grinnell was an American field biologist and zoologist. He made extensive studies of the fauna of California, and is credited with introducing a method of recording precise field observations known as the Grinnell System. He served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley from the museum's inception in 1908 until his death.

He edited The Condor, a publication of the Cooper Ornithological Club, from 1906 to 1939, and authored many articles for scientific journals and ornithological magazines. He wrote several books, among them The Distribution of the Birds of California and Animal Life in the Yosemite. He also developed and popularized the concept of the niche.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Grinnell

https://www.mammalogy.org/uploads/HGrinnell1940.pdf

This was drudgery, for writing did not come easily to Joseph Grinnell. His desire to make every sentence which he wrote exact and clear led him, all his life, to write and re-write manuscripts, often putting them aside to ripen for awhile before the last re- vision. One of his student's has said of him: "He scorned language that was not exact, scientifically accurate and colorless."

Background

Charles H. Feltes, a bander for more than 50 years at 437 Myrtle Avenue, Modesto. California, died in his 90th year on December 14, 1985. His picture appears in the April 1964 Western Bird Bander {page 28). The record shows that he banded more than 50,360 birds of more than 126 species, continuing up to and including the 1982 season. Beginning in 1930 he banded especially large numbers, many thousands each, of Cedar Waxwings, White-crowned Sparrows and Pine Siskins on his large double residential lot. Charlie Feltes was a native of San Francisco and a veteran of World War I. He was much esteemed for his knowledge of and work with birds in and around Modesto. His banding station gradually took on the aspect of a museum of kinds of traps and attracting devices for birds. In 1965 when he learned of the needs of the newly established Point Reyes Bird Observatory, he shipped to PRBO nearly a ton of much appreciated kitchen utensils, equipment and dishes from his "Feltes Trading Post and Antique Store" in Modesto.

Impact on Stanislaus County

In 1930, Charles H. Feltes began a 50 year history of banding birds in Modesto. He banded the county's only record of Bohemian Waxwing (6 in one trap) and captured the first documented specimen of Green-tailed Towhee. The record shows that he banded more than 50,360 birds of more than 126 species.