Harrison Bruce Tordoff

Harrison Bruce "Bud" Tordoff (born February 8, 1923 in Mechanicville , New York , † July 23, 2008 in St. Paul , Minnesota ) was an American ornithologist and museum director. His main focus was on the peregrine falcon in the upper Mississippi River region.

Live and act

Tordoff was the youngest of six children and the only son of Harry and Ethel Dormandy Tordoff. As a teenager, he preferred to be called Bud rather than Harrison. He grew up in the Adirondack Mountains . Together with his father he went hunting, fishing, raised young pheasants for later release and studied wildlife management. Encouraged by Arthur Augustus Allen (1885-1964) and Robert Morrow Mengel (1921-1990) he began studying at Cornell University in 1940 , which he interrupted in 1942 during the Second World War. In 1943 he went to the 52nd Squadron, 353rd Fighter Group of the US Army Air Force , where he flew 85 missions in the air war against the German Reich from 1944 to 1945 with his P51D Mustang . Tordoff called his fighter bomber "Upupa epops" ( hoopoe ). After the war he continued his studies. In 1946 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell and in 1947 he married Jean Van Nostrand. From this marriage the sons Jeffrey and James and the daughter Judy, who died in 1970, were born. From 1947 to 1950 he studied under Josselyn Van Tyne (1902-1957) at the University of Michigan Ornithology, where the doctoral thesis "Systematic Study of the Avian Family Fringillidae, Based on the Structure of the Skull" he for Ph.D. PhD. From 1950 to 1957 Tordoff was an employee at the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History and from 1957 to 1970 at the Michigan Museum of Zoology . From 1970 to 1983 he directed the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota . In 1991, he retired from the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. From 1952 to 1954 he was editor of the Wilson Bulletin, the journal of the Wilson Ornithological Society . Tordoff was a member of the American Ornithologists' Union and its president from 1978 to 1980. In addition, he was closely associated with the encyclopedia project "Birds of North America", which he supported by raising funds. Tordoff was an active conservationist. He worked closely with Harold Ford Mayfield (1911-2007) and the Michigan Audubon Society for the Protection of Michiganwaldsängers together. From 1975 to 1977 he was first chairman of the Minnesota Association of Nature Conservancy . Tordoff had a great passion for peregrine falcons, for whose reintroduction in the upper Mississippi region he was strongly committed. He raised funds for the Midwest Peregrine Restoration Project and ringed hundreds of nestlings. Season after season he recorded the success of the peregrine falcon fledgling and maintained a large database in which he entered the growth statistics of the new population. At the end of the project, which began in 1981, 1,286 peregrine falcon chicks had hatched and Tardoff and his colleagues succeeded in building a population of 128 breeding pairs in the upper Mississippi region. In July 2008, Tordoff died at St. Joseph's Hospital in St. Paul , Minnesota of complications from Alzheimer's disease .

literature

• Frank B. Gill : In Memoriam Harrison Bruce Tordoff, 1923-2008 In: The Auk 126 (2): p. 463-465, 2009

Web links

• Harrison "Bud" Tordoff Obituary in the StarTribune ( memento October 17, 2014 on WebCite ).