Thursday, October 1, 2009 9:04 PM CDT
Friends recall the nature of Barrie Hunt
By Tim Zgonina, Staff Writer
tzognina@jg-tc.com
Hunt — teacher, ornithologist, conservationist — died at the age of 77 on the first day of autumn, during the height of the seasonal flight of the birds he loved over the places he loved.
Barrie Hunt was the dean of Coles County birders — a combination of learning, experience and field skills surpassed by no other local birder and admired by all of them.
“When it came to ornithology, I don’t think I know anyone who had the depth of knowledge he had,” said David Mott, a close friend and site superintendent at Douglas-Hart Nature Center in Mattoon, where Hunt was a longtime presence. “In his last years, some might have been a little quicker than him, but no one had his depth of knowledge. You could not follow him and not learn from him.”
But he was equally admired for his own nature.
“What struck me most about Barrie was his great personal integrity,” said Ruth Riegel of rural Hutton, a student of Hunt during the years when he taught ornithology and biology at Eastern Illinois University from 1967 to his retirement in 1989. “In class he was very intimidating — he took what he did extremely seriously and did not tolerate people who did not put in the effort — but in the field he was very patient with those who were less experienced than he was, and it was always lovely to go out with him.”
Hunt graduated from Asheville School in North Carolina and earned degrees from Miami University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a U.S. Air Force pilot and taught in Kenosha, Wis., and at Eastern. He served on the boards of the Illinois Audubon Society and the Douglas-Hart Foundation. He married his wife, Shirley, in 1955 in Richmond, Ind.
His passion for birding began when he was a young man.
“I was in junior high school and my family went on a trip to Florida,” he told the JG/T-C in a 2006 interview. “There were all these fancy birds there. When I got back home to Indiana, the birds weren’t as fancy, but they were still pretty neat and interesting.”
He enrolled in classes at a nearby college and learned more about ornithology. One of his teachers became a longtime friend, and the two collaborated on more than one academic paper on birds.
“He got me started as a bird bander for the Fish and Wildlife Service. When I reached 18, I got my own banding permit. I did that for 50 years until I gave up my permit in 2000,” he recalled.
One of Hunt’s most gratifying accomplishments was his establishment of Warbler Woods, an Illinois Department of Natural Resources-recognized 200-acre nature preserve located west of Illinois Route 130 off Daileyville Road, between Fox Ridge State Park and Charleston.
“When I first bought it (in 1981) it was really sort of a hobby farm,” he told the JG/T-C in 1999. “As the years went by, I was approached by a developer who thought an upland forest would make a lovely housing site. I decided that the area meant enough to me that I wanted to maintain it as it is. We’ve lost so much meaningful land to development; this was a way to lock things in.”
It was through Warbler Woods that Mott came to become friends with Hunt.
“I live right next door to it,” he said. “I had always wanted to take his ornithology class when I was in college, but it never worked out. So one day when he was out there I went over and introduced myself.
“I knew a little bit about birds and nature, and I thought to myself that I would show this professor just how much I knew. Well, literally within 15 minutes of being with him what I knew was that I was in over my head.
“I decided right then that I would spend as much time as I could with him to learn about birds, so for a couple of years I helped him remove invasive plants and put up bird houses. After a while, we started becoming really close friends. I’d say that most of what I know, he taught me — but I could never learn it all, he knew so much.”
That was in the mid-1990s, and in the years afterward, Mott accompanied Hunt on many bird counts and field trips, during which he came to appreciate Hunt’s spare and subtle wit.
“One Spring Bird Count we were down in the river bottoms and three red rockets zipped past us only a foot or two off the ground, one of them right under his leg. ‘David,’ he says, ‘What were those?’ I said: ‘They’re scarlet tanagers; we’re under attack!’ He just said, ‘It appears to be so,’ and without stopping, wrote them down in his notebook. He had such a dry sense of humor.”
But Mott said it was Hunt’s character that set him apart.
“He had greater integrity than anyone I have ever known,” Mott said. “It was unquestionable. Across the board, he did what he believed was honest and right. He was without guile. Everything had to be just so.”
That sense of precision was a Hunt hallmark, as those who birded with him quickly learned.
“Sometimes I would call him and tell him I’d seen an unusual bird, and he would say, ‘That’s a good one. How sure are you?’ and I would say that I was 99 percent sure. Barrie would say, ‘I don’t want 99, I want 100. Did you see it or didn’t you?’ There just wasn’t any mercy from him.
“He was very exacting. His records about species migration arrival and departure dates are impeccable. It took me 10 years to make it into Barrie’s books, 10 years before he’d take my word to make an entry into his records.”
“He wouldn’t take ‘ifs,’” Riegel said.
Mott said that earning Hunt’s approval was an accomplishment for any birder.
“One time we were out looking for fall warblers (often difficult to identify) and I called a bay breasted. We both saw it, and he said, ‘Good. That’s what it is.’ I admitted that I was just a beginner, and he said, in complete seriousness with that dry wit of his, ‘No, David, I believe you are an advanced intermediate.’
“Well, my head just swelled up with pride. Later on, when I told some of my non-birding friends what he had called me, they didn’t get it. I was bragging. I was so proud that he would say that to me.”
As demanding as Hunt was as an ornithologist, however, he was as patient with youngsters and inexperienced birders.
Hunt started the tradition of Thursday morning bird walks at Douglas-Hart during the spring and fall migration seasons, when birders of any level of experience can traverse the trails of the preserve with veterans and sharpen their skills.
“He was so good with beginners,” Mott said. “If we saw something for the first time, he would stop the group and make sure that everyone got a good look at it. He would stay back from the leader’s position and take time to show the beginners a picture of the bird in the field guide. He was very patient and loved nature so much that he wanted to introduce everyone to it.”
That’s how Riegel, whose father was a colleague of Hunt on the faculty at Eastern, first met him when she was 12 years old.
“I got interested in birds when I was in high school and he would take me birding with him on count days,” she said. “It was really nice of him to take the trouble with a high school kid.
“I would keep his records. He would see and hear things, and I would carry his notebook and pen. He was extremely patient because he loved the idea of getting people outside to enjoy nature. The more you know about what you see, the more you can enjoy it, he always thought.”
Later at Eastern, Riegel had classes under Hunt. “He was a very hard teacher. He didn’t cut you any slack,” she said.
Tough in the classroom, he was just the opposite outside it.
“When I was in graduate school, sometimes I used to park my car in the ‘well’ behind Life Sciences. One time I came out and they were about to tow it away. They said that if I paid my fine right then, they wouldn’t tow it. But I didn’t have any money with me. Barrie was in his office and he gave me the money. He was a very generous person.”
A contemporary of Hunt in what was then the zoology department at Eastern, Richard Funk, also noted Hunt’s affinity for those he taught. “He was always professional but was a person who really got along well with students, especially in his ornithology class,” he said.
“As a birder, he was excellent at collecting and analyzing data on nesting birds and migration times. He created a calendar of when birds are expected in Coles County, and that is used quite a bit. He also was the one who organized the spring bird count here, and that has been going on for 30 years,” Funk said.
Hunt was not just an ornithologist, however. He was a conservationist, and the land ethic he exemplified in Warbler Woods came to him when he was a young man.
“Barrie got his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, and his teachers had been the students of Aldo Leopold himself” (author of “A Sand County Almanac,” one of the primers of the land stewardship and environmental movements in the United States in the 20th century), Mott said. “Those people were his teachers. Most of his beliefs about conservation and wildlife management came in a direct line from Aldo Leopold.
“I remember, once, on a May bird count, probably in about 1973, Barrie and I were down near the lake at Fox Ridge, and we stopped to look at a tree that warblers were crawling all over,” Riegel said. “We had a black-and-white and a blackburnian both in the binoculars at once, and just above them were a black-throated green and several others, maybe a Nashville and a Wilson’s.
“Even though we were trying to cover a huge area that morning, we just stood and watched for a long moment those two gaudy warblers, the zebra stripes of the one and the brilliant flame orange of the other, dancing around the tree trunk in their search for insects. I said something like, ‘Well, we won’t see anything more beautiful than that today.’ And Barrie said, ‘And that’s why we do this.’
“He meant, of course, not that we just go out to see pretty things, but that we work to save the places where these animals live and migrate through.”
Mott said the only rival for Hunt’s devotion to birds was his wife, Shirley.
“They had been together since high school,” he said. “He really cared for her. I remember sometimes we would run into a bunch of warblers in the woods and he would tell me to let him know what we saw because he had to go because he had a lunch date with Shirley. They were a tandem. They were always together.”
About 15 years ago, Hunt was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia — a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow, Mott said.
“He was so courageous and strong willed in his battle with his disease,” said Mott. He just refused to give up. So many times when he would go for his chemo it would take him a couple of days to bounce back, but he didn’t want help. He wanted to stand on his own legs. The last four or five months it was difficult for him to be confined indoors. He was an outdoorsman.”
— Tim Zgonina/Staff Writer
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