The "Lancaster's Native Ornithologist" Story

It was an ordinary day. Checking out Ted Parker's bird calls on my computer. Ted Parker was probably the best field ornithologist who ever lived. And now you can hear 10,000 of his bird, mammal and frog recordings, 19 years after he died in a plane crash in 1993. Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the study of birds. Ted grew up in Lancaster, PA in a house on College Ave., across from the North Museum which is on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College. He was a lot like my youngest son in that he collected butterflies and sea shells. But, what set him apart from most of the other kids on his block was the fact that he could identify all the trees and flowers in the neighborhood. At the age of 12 he became a member of the Lancaster County Bird Club. Many have said that he was without a doubt the most knowledgeable person in field identification of birds that they have ever known. "A fleeting glimpse or a chipped note and he had it. He knew what it was long before it was seen," says fellow bird club member Jan Witmer of Ephrata, PA. Jan's son Eric says, "Ted was one of the few people that I've ever been out with where the birds seemed to come to see him." The Parker dusky-capped flycatcher is one of two birds that Ted discovered and was named after him. When Ted was a senior at J.P. McCaskey High School in Lancaster city, he became the first person ever to record more than 600 North American birds in a single year. In 1993 Ted died in a plane crash with three others while flying over a foggy cloud forest during a treetop bird survey of western Ecuador for The Rapid Assessment Program. This program helped provide scientific information in South America's conservation crises and led to the creation of many parks and reserves in the area. The recordings that I listened to are from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library which is the world's largest and oldest archive of audio and video recordings which Ted helped to set up. Ted was so good at identifying bird calls that if another ornithologist would play a tape for him of an unknown bird, he could recognize it and could often identify other species in the background noise. Now that's amazing! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. PS - photo of Ted Parker taken in Ecuador in 1991 by Randall Hyman; Visit the site at: http://macaulaylibrary.org/search?recordist=Parker,%20Theodore%20A.,%20III&recordist_id=911. I know it is a long address and it doesn't publish as one long address as it should. Maybe you can copy and paste it, but make sure you get the entire address.