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Luis Felipe Baptista:
Maestro of the Avian Symphony
Peter Marler
Any Renaissance man would have good reason to be envious
of Luis Felipe Baptista. The amazing breadth of his knowledge, and the
range of his cultural, linguistic, and scientific skills may have been
equaled, but he was unique in the way in which his many talents, rather
than flowing in separate streams, all merged in one creative torrent.
While browsing again through some of his writings,
I came across a 1998 article he wrote for Revista Macau, a forum
for historical records and reminiscences about life and culture in the
former Portuguese colony. Baptista spent the first 20 years of his life
there and in nearby Hong Kong.
In this archival spirit, Baptista wanted to record
his reflections on the dialect of Portuguese spoken there, and to present
a sampling of his experiences as a precocious observer of Asia’s natural
history. The cultural focus of the article shows in its euphonious title,
“Chivit, Bico-chumbo, and other Pastro-Pastro Macaista” (“The white eye,
spice finch, and other birds of Macao”). In it, Baptista recounts his
observations on a dozen birds he was especially familiar with as a schoolboy.
He describes their habits and voices, and records their names in the Macaista
dialect of Portuguese (just one of the five languages in which he was
fluent, often eloquent, and some would say even loquacious).
Baptista seamlessly interweaves these ornithological
recollections with a brief professional autobiography seasoned with reflections
on the ancient Chinese art of aviculture. Again and again he returns to
the music of birds, a lifelong fascination he traces back to a pair of
budgies and a strawberry finch that his brother gave him as a Christmas
gift when he was eight. He learned to imitate the birds by fluttering
his lips and blowing through his teeth, doing well enough to persuade
a pet canary to copy him.
With its delicate spectacles and endearing song, the
chivit was a favorite of serious bird enthusiasts in Macao. These pampered
pets were kept in a handmade Ching dynasty cage, with porcelain feeding
cups and a tiny vase supplied with fresh flowers each day. As a treat,
especially privileged birds were given a peeled water chestnut spiked
on a Mai Tai Chaap, a tiny steel fork clipped outside the cage. The fork
was mounted on an ivory base carved in the shape of a cicada—the symbol
of longevity—or maybe a crab, or a butterfly.
Baptista recalls the ease with which a chivit could
be taught the song of another favored pet bird, the green singing finch
(Serinus mozambicus). While still a schoolboy, Baptista realized
that birds learned their songs by imitation. The theme was destined to
become a major focus of his professional life as an expert on animal behavior
and world authority on bird song. The experience of raising birds sensitized
his ear to the nuances of their songs and taught him many of the avicultural
skills that served him so well later in life as a serious student of bird
behavior.
Chinese school friends initiated him into other ornithological
mysteries, such as the pastor-tira-sorte, or fortune-telling bird (Padda
oryzivora), which can foretell the future. For a fee, the bird’s keeper
opens the door of its tiny cage. The bird presumably subjects the customer
to close scrutiny, hops to a small box full of numbered sticks, and pulls
one out. The fortuneteller lets the bird take a grain of unhusked rice
as its reward before it returns to the cage. The fortuneteller then matches
the number on the stick with a numbered index card and reads the customer
his or her fortune.
Another favorite songster of old Macao, garbed in the
black hood and white cassock of a Dominican friar, was the Dominico, or
magpie robin (Copsychus saularis). Besides enjoying their songs,
the Macaista also staged fights for them and bet on the outcome in a teahouse
that Baptista frequented as a boy. Baptista describes how they are left
to fight until one retreats and crouches motionless in submission while
the other loudly proclaims victory. Baptista’s anecdotes leave us in no
doubt that a childhood immersed in Chinese culture helped to endow the
future ornithologist with a deep love of birds.
In 1961, at the age of 20, Baptista emigrated to California
to attend university; the state remained his home for the rest of his
life. He took degrees at the University of San Francisco and the University
of California at Berkeley, where he acquired what was to be a lifelong
fascination with the song of the white-crowned sparrow, Zenotrichia
leucophrys. Audible everywhere on the Berkeley campus, this bird would
become the subject of more than half of the 120 or so scientific papers
Baptista would publish. Common in Bay Area parks and gardens, the white-crown
was already known to be the supreme example of learned local dialects
in North American bird songs, but no one had made more than a casual effort
to describe exactly how their songs varied from place to place.
In an amazing tour de force, Baptista mapped these
songs in exquisite detail from California to British Columbia. Armed with
a tape recorder, headphones, and his slightly intimidating, parabola-mounted
microphone, he toured tirelessly up and down the West Coast in an old
Mercedes, constantly alert for new song patterns, and infuriating other
drivers by screeching to a halt at the slightest avian sound, blissfully
unaware of the traffic jams he created.
He showed that boundaries between dialects are sometimes
sharp, but often fuzzy, and that birds may be bilingual at the interface.
Using his acutely sensitive ear and remarkable memory, he was able to
infer where birds singing during autumn migration had originated, and
that they uttered songs which locals then later adopted. This became the
classical work on bird song dialects.
Baptista traveled the world to study song and call
dialects of birds. As a fellow of the elite Max Planck Institute for Behavioral
Physiology in Bavaria for a couple of years, Baptista turned his attention
to the chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs). The outcome was probably
the most thorough study ever of geographical variation in a bird call,
as opposed to song. Baptista toured southwest Germany recording and analyzing
nearly 3,500 of the male chaffinch’s “rain calls,” so-called because this
low-level alarm call sometimes heralds an approaching storm. He showed
how the variants are distributed as local dialects, in much the same way
as in the male song. He went on to study the vocal behavior of birds in
many other parts of the world, including the Caribbean, Costa Rica, and
New Guinea.
The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco
was Baptista’s home base for the last 20 years of his life. He grew to
know practically every resident white-crowned sparrow in Golden Gate Park
personally, and was full of anecdotes about them. A close colleague once
described him as the Henry Higgins of the bird world. “Luis could stand
in the park, hear a call, and declare that ‘the white-crown had a Canadian
father and a California mother. It has half an Alberta accent and half
a Monterey accent. The parents probably met at the Tioga Pass near Yosemite.’”
He did some remarkable experiments on the responses of white-crowned sparrows
to different song dialects.
 |
| Luis
Baptista's efforts were crucial to the keeping alive the plan to restore
the Socorro dove (Zenaida graysoni) to its native island off the coast
of Mexico. |
Baptista demonstrated that, although male white-crowns
learn best when young, the timing of song learning is to some extent malleable,
especially if older males are exposed to strong social stimulation. Building
on his youthful experiences with caged birds, he was the first to find
examples of wild birds not known to be habitual mimics that occasionally
learned the songs of other species.
This important finding showed that birds’ preferences
for learning the songs of their own species is not necessarily a consequence
of a physical inability to sing the songs of others. Instead it reflects
a bird’s ability to recognize its own species’ song before it starts to
sing itself.
Perhaps the most compelling example of his prowess
as an aviculturalist was his demonstration in hand-reared Anna’s hummingbirds
that song is learned. Their tiny, delicate babies are among the most difficult
of birds to raise.
Later in life, Baptista became deeply involved in the
conservation of bird populations, especially the 300 or more species of
doves that live in all parts of the world. He will be especially remembered
for the ongoing effort, using captive-bred birds, to reinstate the Socorro
dove on its native island home off the coast of Mexico, where it was extirpated
some 20 years ago. Baptista became an authority on doves, and coauthored
a major monograph on them for the encyclopedic Handbook of Birds of
the World with colleague Pepper Trail and longtime companion Helen
Horblit. Horblit and Baptista presided over a household that often overflowed
with birds of all kinds, to say nothing of the succulents, cacti, and
cycads on which Baptista was also an expert.
 |
| Baptista, on a pilgrimage
to Charles Dawin's home at Down House, England, contemplates a bust
of the great biologist. |
Throughout his life, Baptista’s omnivorous appetite
for knowledge never abated. He appreciated classical music and was participating
in a National Academy of Sciences project on the biology of music and
its relationship to bird song at the time of his death. He was also contemplating
a radically new edition of his comprehensive textbook The Life of Birds,
coauthored originally with the late Joel Welty. This scholar’s goldmine
has already served a generation of ornithologists, including young, aspiring
initiates and their elders in need of intellectual refreshment.
Above all, Luis Baptista was unstintingly generous
with his knowledge. On his office door, he posted a quote from Thomas
Jefferson: “You are here to enrich the lives of others,” a commitment
he honored in full.
Peter Marler
is professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of California
at Davis.
Reminiscences of Luis
For Luis
Michael McClure
Experience can be said
to have inspired the linnet divinely
but the song is born
from the deep lyric’s grammar
located in flesh inside
of the head.
When the meat and fluff
drops away and the beak is clean
of the touch of the tongue
then the home of the song is gone
though it still is heard
in the forest. To chant,
the troubador must hear
the voice of an elder
master. That makes the
light that brightens
the depths of the skull.
Flutterings transmute
to concertos and garbled
chatter changes
to warblings—the plain
blank field
becomes verdure. Pensive,
the white-turbaned sparrow is listening
but it hears no music
when the towhee calls.
It’s meaningless background
to him. The core of the music is childless
if it has no listener—then
it’s strange as another planet.
|
| Specimen Days with Luis Baptista
Pepper Trail
I had the good fortune to spend many days in the
field with Luis. Of course, for Luis “the field” encompassed any
outdoor locality with a singing white-crowned sparrow, and so included
every patch of greenery in San Francisco. One memorable spring evening,
Luis and I headed into Chinatown for dinner. As we emerged from
the parking garage underneath Portsmouth Square, Luis stopped abruptly.
Holding up a finger, he urged me to concentrate until, finally,
I detected, between the sounds of traffic and the cries of children
drifting over the rooftops, the thin whistle of a white-crown. After
much scanning, we located the bird, perched on a restaurant’s skewed
TV antenna. There was certainly no other white-crown within hearing,
but this wandering bird had found the most appreciative audience
in the world: Luis, grinning from ear to ear, standing at the borderline
between East and West, lost in the beauty of this evening serenade.
Luis astounded many visitors with his encyclopedic
knowledge of the sparrows of Golden Gate Park. Every spring, he
dragged nonplused millionaire donors and bemused world-famous scholars
outside to regale them with tales of avian divorce, duplicity, and
dynastic struggle in the hedges around the Academy. For several
years I also studied the white-crowns of the park. Every afternoon
I would walk into the Birds and Mammals Department and report the
results of the morning’s field work. Luis often knew the identities
of the birds I was studying before I did (it could take days to
get a good look at their color-band combinations), and unfailingly
rattled off their genealogy and the details of their songs. I can’t
count the number of times when he sent me to a distant corner of
the park to search for a particular pair, and there they were.
I traveled to a more exotic locale with Luis only
once, for our study of the St. Lucia black finch. This mysterious
bird had often been mentioned as a possible relative of Darwin’s
finches, but its behavior had never been studied. As we bounced
along the nominal roads that hugged the steep cliffs of this Caribbean
island in our rented jeep, Luis endangered our lives with his hilariously
fractured renditions of reggae songs.
The project was a great success: we found an active
nest and made the first field study of the black finch, confirming
many similarities between the St. Lucia black finch (genus Melanospiza),
Darwin’s finches, and the grassquits (genus Tiaris), as Luis had
predicted.
One night near the end of the trip, we were camped
at a remote cove on the arid east side of the island. This was a
sea turtle nesting beach, and we had been asked by local biologists
to count any turtles that came ashore. We awoke after midnight to
stumble along the beach, the faint moonlight just bright enough
to reveal the weird shapes of the cacti and agaves in the darkness.
Suddenly, we came upon a gigantic form looming up from the sand:
a leatherback turtle laying her eggs. Uncharacteristically speechless,
Luis kneeled down and stroked the strangely soft back of the turtle.
But he could never be close to an animal for long without speaking
to it, and soon Luis was crooning to the mother leatherback in his
quiet, melodic, sing-song way. For over an hour, the only sounds
were the gentle crashing of the surf, the sighs of the laboring
turtle, and Luis’s encouraging voice.
Luis had many special qualities, but perhaps they
came down to this: he was a profoundly encouraging soul. By his
generosity, his intelligence, his curiosity, and his boundless love
of life, he encouraged everyone who knew him. It is hard to imagine
a better legacy. |
| In Search Of Pigeons
Helen Horblit
It was supposed to be a couple of hours’ drive
according to the distance on the map, but we didn’t count on the
roundabouts, and it took more than five hours to drive to the end
of England—Land’s End. We went not to see the smugglers’ caves,
but to see the place where wild rock doves lived, living as ‘pigeons’
were supposed to at the sea’s edge nesting on small ledges above
the treacherous waves. The larks ascending from the bluffs behind
us were a bonus and inspired Luis to whistle Vaughn Williams’s imitation
of the birds.
Afterward, we barreled halfway back across England
to Down House, Darwin’s residence, a point of pilgrimage for island
biologists. Luis wanted to look at Darwin’s stuffed pigeons. He
had been there earlier in the year with his friend Clive Catchpole,
and Luis guiltily related how they had taken turns jumping the velvet
rope in Darwin’s study as the other grown biologist acted as lookout
in case the caretaker came. They sat behind Darwin’s desk in Darwin’s
chair just long enough for evolutionary inspiration to flow.
We arrived after tea, walked the paths where Darwin
walked, and headed for the study. Luis and Clive had been so excited
about their trespass that they never noticed the video security
camera pointed at the desk to catch the pious. We retreated to the
parlor where the glass cases containing the pigeons stood. With
a look perhaps of recognition, the caretaker allowed Luis to hop
the velvet rope for a closer look at the pigeons, still brilliant
after more than 100 years. Luis recognized all the breeds and I
heard him murmur, “So that’s where he was going.” |
|
My Friend, Louie
Bob Drewes
Louie was consumed and driven by his passions.
I remember a function at Pepperwood Ranch, the Academy’s nature
reserve, where the curators were present to interpret the wonders
of the landscape for visitors. Although I was the reptile and amphibian
expert, I quickly learned that if Louie found a frog or lizard or
snake before I did, an immediate lecture on the critter would ensue
from him. And it would be every bit as deep and precise as I would
have delivered. I watched the botanists and the entomologists learn
the same lesson that day. The depth of his knowledge was staggering.
And whoever was standing next to him got the benefit. It was not
really lecturing or teaching that Louie did, it was sharing.
In 1999, Louie traveled to the Bohemian Grove
with me to give a “Museum Talk.” To a first-time visitor, the Grove
can be a very intimidating place. To a first-time speaker, the prospect
of lecturing to a crowd of over 400 men, many of whom are among
the most powerful in the country, can be daunting. Louie was as
eloquent, confident, and powerful as I ever heard him. At the conclusion,
many men came down to the podium and kept him there for questions.
The last and most persistent three included the president of a university,
a world authority on hearing loss, and the director of a well-known
acoustics laboratory.
Later, Louie and I were invited to a place
called Pelican Camp for lunch. Pelicans is a somewhat formal camp
whose membership includes the likes of Walter Alvarez and Richard
Muller, both world-class scientists at Berkeley, a political scientist
or two, and a famous musician. Guests are frequently tapped to speak
extemporaneously. Louie got the nod and proceeded to regale us with
marvelous anecdotes about pelicans. After lunch a group of guest
musicians played the works of an obscure Venezuelan composer named
Astor Piazzolla, who wrote tangos for the accordion. No one else
at our end of the table had ever heard of him, so we were astounded
to learn that Louie not only knew the works of Piazzolla, but his
personal history as well. And, when the group finished, Louie got
up, walked over and embraced one of the older musicians who, it
turned out, had, years ago, played music with his uncle. I remember
being warmed beyond my ability to describe. |
| In the Field
Sandra Gaunt
For those of us who worked with Luis in the field,
his talent as a raconteur took on a whole different color. He was
always animated during the telling of a story, and he often couldn’t
talk, gesticulate, and walk at the same time. This was the case
one particular day in Reserva Biológica Hitoy Cerere in Costa Rica.
Luis, a colleague, and I were fording a rather fast tributary of
the Rio Estrella. It was shallow in only a narrow stretch that forced
us to walk no more than two abreast. Each of us was loaded down
with equipment—binoculars, recorders, microphones, parabolic reflector—and
supplies, and trying not to get anything wet. Luis was in front,
talking a mile a minute when, in the swiftest section, in order
to expand the animation that accompanied his story, he stopped dead.
I am afraid I became quite impatient.
That evening, as we walked back to the camp, I
stopped to examine what I thought was a small frog and was quite
puzzled when Luis piped up, without really being close enough to
see what I was looking at... or so I thought. “That’s a toad bug,”
he said. Sure enough, I found it later in Study of Insects by Borror,
DeLong and Triplehorn—Gelastocoris oculatus—a toad bug! What a day!
|
|
Reminiscences of Luis Baptista Barbara
B. DeWolfe
Luis loved to tell how he transformed his Ph.D.
qualifying oral exam: “When I entered the room I saw six grim-looking
men sitting stiffly upright around the table. Their first question
to me was: ‘Do you know an example of parthenogenesis in vertebrates?’
“‘You mean the Virgin Mary?’ I replied. After that, everyone relaxed.”
A daughter of actor Jimmy Stewart visited Luis
one day and said she would like to work for him. “Just a rich, spoiled
kid,” Luis told me he thought, but he took her outside the Academy
to show her where he was observing white-crowned sparrows. As they
stood talking, a gull flew overhead and deposited its droppings
on Judy’s head. “When the gull shit on her, she never even flinched,”
Luis said. “I knew then she would make a good field assistant.”
(She did.)
Luis was appointed Head of Birds and Mammals at
the California Academy of Sciences in part to effect a more frequent
and favorable rapport with the visiting public. He was superbly
successful at this. Once when Luis was telling a general audience
about his research, his infectious enthusiasm inspired one elderly
lady to ask Luis to give her a wish list of things he needed for
his research. Luis wrote her a letter, telling her in detail his
goals and the equipment he would need. She replied: “I don’t understand
one word of your letter, but please use these stock certificates
to buy whatever you want.” |
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