Don Richard Eckelberry

Donald "Don" Richard Eckelberry (born July 6, 1921 in Sebring , Ohio , † January 14, 2001 in Bay Shore , New York ) was an American bird artist and conservationist .

Life

Eckelberry's walking ability was painfully affected by an injury during childbirth. It was only after a series of operations that he was able to walk unaided by the age of five. At the age of 13, after being given binoculars by his uncle, the industrial designer Viktor Schreckengost , he began to devote himself seriously to bird watching and drawing. When he was 15, he founded a bird club, wrote nature columns for two newspapers, attended summer art courses, and had a solo exhibition of his paintings in Cleveland. After high school , Eckelberry had the opportunity to study at the Cleveland Institute of Art thanks to the generous financial support of his uncle Viktor and aunt Nadine . Here he also met his future wife Virginia Nepodal (1914–2009), who was teaching a designer class for beginners when she was 21. To make a living, Eckelberry went to California , where he worked as a foreman in an optics factory in Hollywood . After accompanying John H. Baker , then director of the National Audubon Society (NAS), on a desert tour to the Salton Sea , he received an offer to work for NAS, where he initially worked as a game warden at the Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in Louisiana worked. He also worked as a draftsman and layout artist for Audubon Magazine .

In April 1944, Eckelberry visited the northern Singer Tract in Louisiana, where he was able to sketch the last confirmed female of an ivory woodpecker ( Campephilus principalis ) in North America, making him one of the last people to see this probably extinct bird species alive. About this he wrote the chapter Search for the Rare Ivorybill in the book Discovery: Great Moments in the Lives of Outstanding Naturalists , published in 1961 by John K. Terres . In 1944 he married Virginia Nepodal in the house of his friend Richard H. Pough , to whom Eckelberry owes his first professional artist commission. He illustrated several Pough bird guides including Audobon Bird Guide: Eastern Land Birds in 1946, Audubon Bird Guide: Small Land Birds of Eastern & Central North America from Southern Texas to Central Greenland in 1949, Audubon Water Bird Guide: Water, Game And Large Land Birds Eastern and Central North America from Southern Texas to Central Greenland in 1951 and Audubon Western Bird Guide: Land Water and Game Birds of Western North America from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean in 1957. Since Eckelberry does not include this work in his He left the NAS and became a freelance artist. For the books in Pough's Audubon Bird Guide series, he depicted around 1250 birds from North America and Mexico individually and in color.

Eckelberry illustrated over 20 books on birds and natural history, including Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World (1968) by Leslie H. Brown and Dean Amadon , Life Histories of Central American Birds (1954, 1960, 1969) by Alexander Frank Skutch , Birds of the West Indies (1961) by James Bond and A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (1973) by Richard Ffrench . He also painted hundreds of conservation stamps, including an array of wildflowers for the National Wildlife Federation's annual natural stamp issuance .

In 1967, Don Eckelberry, Guy Coheleach, and Ray Harm raised funds to buy the Spring Hill Plantation and additional land at Corkscrew Swamp, a thousand- acre property in Trinidad known internationally for its nesting oilfish and a variety of other tropical species. The campaign raised over $ 250,000. They renamed it the Asa Wright Nature Center after its previous owner Asa Wright, and it is now used as a non-profit center for ecotourism and research.

In 1970 the Frame House Gallery in Louisville commissioned the 54-minute documentary Birds in the Hand - Birds in the Bush , in which Eckelberry can be seen during a stay on the island of Trinidad.

Dedication names and honors

In 2017 ornithologists Daniel Lane , Andrew W. Kratter and John Patton O'Neill honored Eckelberry in the species epithet of the Pipra species Machaeropterus eckelberryi from Peru . In 1979 Eckelberry was one of the earliest recipients of the Master Wildlife Artist Award, presented by the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum . In 1992 the Society of Animal Artists presented him with the Medal of Excellence. The Don Eckelberry Endowment (now The Don and Virginia Eckelberry Endowment) was founded at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences to honor Eckelberry's life's work and to promote talented young artists. The foundation supports painters, sculptors, graphic artists and other artists in their efforts to become better acquainted with nature. through both museum and field research.

Illustrated works

• Richard H. Pough: Audobon Bird Guide: Eastern Land Birds , 1946
• Elswyth Thane : The Bird Who Made Good , 1947
• Richard H. Pough: Audubon Bird Guide: Small Land Birds of Eastern & Central North America from Southern Texas to Central Greenland , 1949
• John Kieran : An Introduction to Birds , 1950
• Richard H. Pough: Audubon Water Bird Guide: Water, Game And Large Land Birds Eastern and Central North America from Southern Texas to Central Greenland , 1951
• Robert Stell Lemmon : The Birds are yours , 1951
• Aretas Andrews Saunders : A Guide to Bird Songs: Descriptions and Diagrams of the Songs and Singing Habits of Land Birds and Selected Species of Shore Birds , 1951
• Robert Stell Lemmon: Our Amazing Birds: The little-known facts about their private lives , 1952
• Richard H. Pough: All the Birds of Eastern and Central North America , 1953
• Allan D. Cruickshank : The Pocket Guide to Birds - Eastern and Central North American: How to Identify and Enjoy Them , 1953
• John Kieran: An Introduction to Nature: Birds, Wildflowers, Trees , 1954
• Alexander Frank Skutch: Life Histories of Central American Birds, Families Fringillidae, Thraupidae, Icteridae Parulidae and Coerebidae , 1954
• Richard H. Pough: Audubon Western Bird Guide: Land Water and Game Birds of Western North America from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean , 1957
• Paul Hyde Bonner : Aged in the Woods. Stories and Sketches of Fishing and Shooting , 1958
• Alexander Frank Skutch: Life Histories of Central American Birds: II - Families Vireonidae, Sylviidae, Turdidae, Troglodytidae, Paridae, Corvidae, Hirundinidae and Tyrannidae , 1960
• James Bond: Birds of the West Indies , 1961 (Illustrations by Don R. Eckelberry and Arthur B. Singer )
• National Wildlife Foundation: Wildlife Conservation Stamp Album 1962 , 1962
• Stephen M. Russell : A Distributional Study of the Birds of British Honduras , 1964
• Alfred Marshall Bailey , Robert J. Niederach: Birds of Colorado , Volume 2, 1966
• C. Brooke Worth : A Naturalist in Trinidad , 1967
• James A. Tucker: Florida Birds: How to Attract, Feed and Know Them , 1968
• Leslie H. Brown, Dean Amadon Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World , 1968
• Alexander Frank Skutch: Life Histories of Central American Birds III: Families Cotingidae, Pipridae, Formicariidae, Furnariidae, Dendrocolaptidae, and Picidae , 1969
• Richard Ffrench: A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago , 1973 (Illustrations by Don R. Eckelberry and John P. O'Neill)
• Lester Rossin : The Art of Bird Painting , 1977

literature

• Nicholas Hammond: Twentieth Century Wildlife Artists. Overlook Books, 1986, ISBN 0-87951-221-0 , pp. 59-63
• Nicholas Hammond: Modern Wildlife Painting. Pica Press, 1998, ISBN 187-340-355-0 , p. 127.
• Albert Earl Gilbert , Dean Amadon: In Memoriam: Don Richard Eckelberry, 1921-2001. The Auk 118 (3), 2001, pp. 736-739

Web links

• Tony Angell: Don Eckelberry: A Personal Profile. Living Bird, Winter 2001
• Literature by and about Don Richard Eckelberry in the WorldCat bibliographic database