Helen Hays: January 22, 1931 - February 5, 2025

I will post more about my friend and mentor in the future. For now I will post the following.

        How do you say goodbye to a person you have known for over fifty years. Especially when that person is someone like Helen. A person who was responsible for the life you have had. I know that Ann understands. Ann and I have been together for over forty years, but we would not have met if not for Helen. In fact, many of my closest friends were met because of Helen. To say that Helen was unique, and a force of nature is a cliché and certainly does not do her justice. Helen, through her own love of nature and birds in particular, literally helped change the world around her. Through her work on Great Gull Island and the students she inspired she left a legacy that cannot be measured and that will go on for generations. The day she died I started sending the sad news out. Within twelve hours tributes to her were being posted on multiple continents. Helen herself had visited every continent except Africa as well as islands in the Pacific. Like her beloved terns she was a traveler. I was lucky enough to travel with her to South America many times where we encountered some of the very same individual terns we had banded on Great Gull Island. As everywhere she went, she inspired people in South America to study and protect her terns. Of course, the Common and Roseate terns were not her only love. Before the terns she studied Ruddy Ducks in Manitoba and did ground-breaking work on the Spotted Sandpipers on Great Gull Island. She loved field work. When she wasn’t in the field she loved the theater, music and opera; all of which she enjoyed sharing with her friends.

        I still haven’t answered my original question about how to say goodbye to Helen. It is because I still don’t know how. There are too many memories. They give some comfort, and I take joy in looking back at the incredible and wonderful life she led and having some knowledge of the many other lives besides mine that she touched. So no, I don’t know how to say goodbye, other than to say: “Helen, I will miss you.”

March 10, 2025: A Book Recommendation - Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto

This is a departure from natural history, but I want to highly recommend a just published book: Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America by Russell Shorto (W. W. Norton & Co.). It is a sequel to the same author’s classic book The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (2004, Doubleday). Shorto’s earlier book recounted the history of New Amsterdam and how many of the American ideals of religious freedom and pluralism that are often attributed to the English colonies were actually passed on to the American colonies from the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. In his new book, Shorto recounts the events of the late summer of 1664 when England sent a flotilla under command of Richard Nicolls to take control of New Amsterdam away from the Netherlands and add it to the growing British Empire. Instead of the military confrontation that both sides expected Nicolls and the Dutch leader of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, negotiated a peaceful transfer of power from the Dutch to the English. Nicolls renamed the town at the southern tip of Manhattan New York and became the colonies first English governor. Shorto describes the peaceful transition as a merger rather than a military takeover. He guaranteed the population the rights and freedoms they had been used to under the Dutch and gave rise to modern New York city and many of the freedoms of the future United States.