Robert Porter Allen

Robert Porter Allen (born April 24, 1905 in South Williamsport , Lycoming County , Pennsylvania , † June 28, 1963 in Tavernier , Florida ) was an American ornithologist and conservationist . He attracted international attention with his rescue operations for the whooping crane in the 1940s and 1950s.

Life

Allen's parents were Welsh and English . His father was a lawyer , his mother a former school teacher. Through relationships with his biology teacher Allen was a member of the Junior Audubon Club, where he attended lectures by Arthur Augustus Allen (1885-1964) and Louis Agassiz Fuertes and pen pals with Frank Michler Chapman and Thomas Gilbert Pearson (1873-1943) maintained. After finishing high school , he went to Lafayette College , which he dropped out after two years. In the fall of 1925, he enrolled at Cornell University . Due to the death of his father, he dropped out of this course after three months. In the following years he went to sea for three years, where he was shipwrecked in the Sulu Sea . At the beginning of the Great Depression , Allen met Frank Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City , but he could only offer him a voluntary position. In addition, he arranged for him to talk to Thomas Gilbert Pearson, the then head of the National Audubon Society , which should set the course for Allen's future career.

Allen became a member of the National Audubon Society, where he was initially entrusted with cataloging Pearson's considerable library. In 1931 he conducted field studies on the condition of the heron colonies in North Carolina and South Carolina . He then made a survey of the breeding birds on the Maine coast. The latter led to the discovery of the first black-headed gull breeding colony in the United States. In the following years Allen did a lot of field research, although he was still employed as a librarian. In the fall of 1932 he was appointed to the Cape May Peninsula in New Jersey , where he assisted a state ranger in protecting birds of prey . In addition to this main task, he collected specimens of birds of prey to determine their feeding behavior. Later he and Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996) worked on an article on the migration behavior of buzzards on the Cape May Peninsula, which was published in 1936 in the journal The Auk .

In 1934 Allen finished his service in the library of the National Audubon Society and succeeded Ernest Golsan Holt (1889-1983) as director of the Department of Conservation Areas . In early 1935 there was a change at the top of the National Audubon Society. Pierson retired and John Hopkinson Baker (1894–1973) took over his post. The workforce was increased and the focus was more on field work. In 1939, Baker proposed a long-term study of the roseate spoonbill , as had previously been carried out for the ivory woodpecker and the California condor and funded by the National Audubon Society. Allen gave up his position in the department for nature reserves and began researching the roseate spoonbill. In October of the same year he moved to the small town of Tavernier on Key Largo with his wife and two young children . Allen set up camp in the mangrove swamps on Bottle Key in Florida Bay , where he could see the spoonbills up close. His study of the roseate spoonbill in Florida and Texas was published in 1942 as Audubon Research Report No. 2 published. During World War II served as Allen Maat on a minelayer of the United States Navy . It was retired in early 1946.

At the beginning of the 1940s, conservationists and ornithologists were alarmed by the extremely low population of the whooping crane. The only agency that could organize an investigation was the National Audubon Society. An agreement was made with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and in 1945 the Cooperative Whooping Crane Project was launched. In the fall of 1946, Allen was assigned to this project. He and his family settled in the small town of Austwell near the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texan coast. For the next three years, Allen studied the whooping cranes. He followed them on their migration route from Texas to Nebraska , to Saskatchewan and beyond to the Arctic Circle in order to find the then unknown nesting grounds of the whooping cranes. His study was published in 1952 as Research Report No. 3 published by the National Audubon Society.

Even before the Whooping Crane Report was published, Allen had started his next project on the Cuban flamingo . The well-known colonies on Andros in the Bahamas , which were described by Frank Chapman, had disappeared. Allen visited the well-known distribution area of ​​the flamingos in the entire Caribbean from the Yucatán peninsula to Bonaire in the Lesser Antilles. This project lasted between 1950 and 1956, interrupted only once by the long delayed discovery of the nesting grounds of the whooping crane in the northern part of Wood Buffalo National Park in 1954 and by the exploration of the nesting grounds in the summer of 1955. His flamingo project didn't finish Allen anymore. Allen spent his last years in the service of the National Audubon Society studying the great wading birds. He retired on June 30, 1960; he died in 1963.

Works and awards

Allen has authored several books, including Flame Birds (1947) on the roseate spoonbill and On the Trail of Vanishing Birds (1957) on the whooping crane and Cuban flamingo and Birds of the Caribbean (1961). He is also one of the co-authors of the monumental work Birds of North America . He has also written articles for magazines, including Bird Lore , later renamed Audubon Magazine , National Geographic and Blackwoods Magazine , which appeared in England.

In 1957 Allen was honored with the Brewster Memorial Award of the American Ornithologists' Union , where he was an elected member in 1944 and a fellow in 1955. In 1958 he received the John Burroughs Award . He is also a recipient of the Nash Award for his conservation work. In 1964, the National Park Service named three Keys in the Florida Bay Bob Allen Keys .

literature

• Kathleen Kaska: The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story . University Press of Florida, Gainesville 2012, ISBN 978-0-8130-4024-0 (English).
• Alexander Sprunt, IV: In Memoriam: Robert Porter Allen . In: The Auk . tape 86 , no. 1 , 1969, p. 26–34 (English, online [PDF; 483 kB ; accessed on February 14, 2016]).