Pat was among the best birders I’ve ever known, meticulous almost to a fault regarding the details of identifying North American birds, and I back then was a hard core lister refusing to count a bird unless I snapped a good picture. Pat knew nothing about photography, but we found common ground in the extended time and patience it took the two of us on a bird, Pat to parse through the defining plumage characteristics and me to carefully document those diagnostics with the camera.
Pat unexpectedly passed away last month in Vermont, his home state, still actively birding well into his ninth decade and having published a chronicle of the “last ‘big year” of birding” (his words) in his life. Vermont is the common strand through today’s column, one that speaks to the vast diversity of the human connection to nature while pulling it all together into one small world. I think birders will relate.
I was already a long time into this birding life before I first heard the joke about the skeins of migrating geese that are so beloved by romantic nature lovers—“Scientists have finally discovered why one line of the “V” formed by flying geese is shorter than the other . . . there are fewer geese in it!” I first heard this groaner twenty years ago from the non-birding companion of a birding friend as we searched for screech-owls on a moon bright night along the Salt River, honking Canada Geese passing overhead.
Shortly after Pat’s death, as I listened to NPR on Thanksgiving morning, they reran a classic piece from WBUR-Boston of long-time Here and Now co-host Robin Young’s trip to Vermont to visit her elderly uncle, a birder and keen observer of nature, to see migrating geese. Not having heard the episode before, I was blown away to learn they had met up with local Vermont nature writer and field biologist, Bryan Pfeiffer, an acquaintance I hadn’t seen or spoken with since pre-pandemic, and then I listened in disbelief as he regaled them with the old goose joke! Surely it had not originated with him?
Bryan had been the President of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas shortly after I became hooked on odonata, I had picked his brain about New England species I wanted to photograph, and it had been he who informed me of Chris Pratt’s death before Pat had contacted me. He is also the only birder I know personally who has eschewed out-of-home-state travel for birds because of the ecological footprint of what we do. Good on him, bad on me. And on all of us.
I have Pat and Chris Pratt to thank for putting me on my lifer Bicknell’s Thrush in Vermont, but they were not listers themselves, per se. Nonetheless, like so many of us they were goal oriented in their avian pursuits, so in 2012 they set out to find 150 species in each of Vermont’s fourteen counties, in each case within a calendar year. something no one else had ever accomplished. After Chris’s untimely death in the spring of 2017, Pat determined to try to complete that quest, and his book, My Big Year, is a chronicle of his ultimate success.
Though we were more than half a generation apart in age, Pat, the dry, taciturn New Englander and I, the not-so-wild-child of the ‘60s culture wars, had much in common. Obviously there was the shared love of birds, but there was so much more: we both adored our wives, the true loves of both our lives; we both enjoyed careers in teaching, he in academia, I in athletics; we both loved south Texas and the tropics; we both had a deep concern for the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised in our society; and we both knew our species was ruining the planet.
My favorite photograph of our many adventures with Pat and Chris came from our Bicknell’s Thrush trip to Vermont in June, 1997. We stayed in the rustic cabin on their rural property on Ward Hill in Duxbury, and someone(?) snapped a picture of me, buck naked, showering outdoors under a dripping pipe from their well. In 2020 Pat, who had successfully led efforts to prevent subdivision and fragmentation of high elevation habitats and pristine headwaters in Vermont, donated their beautiful Ward Hill property to The Vermont Land Trust, protected now in perpetuity as the Pratt Refuge.
I was pleased and surprised to receive a copy of My Big Year and discover in his signing that Pat referred to me as “a fellow birder of the old school . . . soul mates, loving every feather of every bird we manage to find and welcome into our hearts.” Amen Pat, and may Team Pipit (the Pratts’ personalized license plate) live forever in the annals of Vermont birding. You were a very special friend.