Ontbirds subscribers,
This e-mail is intended so that those in the Ontario birding community and
beyond, who may not have heard yet, will know of the passing on Saturday of
beloved birder and author Fred Bodsworth in his 94th year.
The following death notice appeared in yesterday's Toronto Star:
BODSWORTH, Fred,
Celebrated Canadian Author, "Mr. Curlew" died September 15, 2012, one month
short of his 94th birthday. He was predeceased by his loving wife Margaret
Banner. Dear father of Barbara Welch (Ed), Nancy Hannah (Rick), and Neville
Bodsworth (Lois Mombourquette). Cherished grandfather of Wendy, Erin, Lisa,
Lori, Tyler, Tara, Margaret, Aidan and Cameron. Doting great grandfather of
Cristian and Holden. Fred was a self-taught scientist with an insatiable
curiosity for the natural world and a life-long passion for birds. There will
be a private family service. Friends are invited to join us at the Bracebridge
Sewage Lagoons (Kerr Park) on Sunday, October 7, 2012 for a hike in Fred's
memory. We will meet at Kerr Park at 9 a.m. for brunch with a hike to follow. A
Memorial Service in November will be announced later. Charitable donations can
be made to Ontario Nature, Bird Studies Canada or Canadian Nature Conservancy.
Online condolences may be sent via www.sherrinfuneral.ca
Charles Frederick "Fred" Bodsworth was born on October 11, 1918 in Port
Burwell, Ontario. Fred graduated from Port Burwell public and high schools and
went on to a career in journalism, working freelance for the Port Burwell
Enterprise, London Free Press and Woodstock Sentinel-Review during the
Depression, as a full-time reporter for the St. Thomas Times-Journal 1940-1943,
a reporter and editor for the Toronto Daily Star and Weekly Star 1943-1946, and
staff writer and editor at Maclean's Magazine 1947-1955. Since 1955, Fred had
pursued a career as a freelance writer and editor, publishing four novels: Last
of the Curlews (1955, Toronto and New York, Dodd Mead); The Strange One (1959,
Toronto and New York, Dodd Mead); The Atonement of Ashley Morden (1964, Toronto
and New York, Dodd Mead); and The Sparrow's Fall (1967, Toronto, McClelland and
Stewart and New York, Doubleday). Fred also wrote and edited for several
non-fiction titles including: The People's Health: Canada and WHO (with Brock
Chisholm) - Canadian Association for Adult Education, Toronto, 1949; The
Pacific Coast volume of the Natural Science of Canada series, 1970; and
Wilderness Canada, Clark Irwin, Toronto, 1970. In the spring of 1954, Fred
wrote a short novelette for the May 15th issue of Maclean's magazine entitled
"Last of the Curlews", accompanied by illustrations by well-known editorial
cartoonist Duncan Mcpherson. In that era, Maclean's magazine was a far more
literary publication than it is today, more akin to the New Yorker than to a
news magazine like Time, as in its current incarnation. Many of Canada's most
famous and successful writers often published short pieces of fiction in its
pages. When "Last of the Curlews" was published in Maclean's, the overwhelming
positive reader response far eclipsed that of any other work the magazine had
ever published, and Fred was encouraged to expand the work into a larger novel.
The completed novel version of "Last of the Curlews", accompanied by over 40
peerless scratchboard illustrations by artist/naturalist Terry Shortt, provided
a fictionalized account of the last pair of Eskimo Curlews, and was published
by Dodd Mead in February 1955, and was immediately received enthusiastically by
the public. It has since been widely cited as one of the finest pieces of
natural history-based fiction ever written. The book's genius is that it
transforms the reader's appreciation for the extraordinary life experiences
that migratory birds encounter and the challenges they must overcome on a daily
basis. It uses the tragic story of the Eskimo Curlew as a parable to impart a
sense of both the gravity of extinction and the sinister role played by the
often wanton hand of mankind on the natural world. The book was chosen for
inclusion as a Readers' Digest novel selection and eventually went on to sell
in excess of three million copies - an improbable result for a love story with
no human characters or dialogue. In all the years since it was first published,
it has never been out of print. The book has been translated into twelve
foreign languages and was adapted into an animated film by Hanna-Barbera
Productions that first aired on the American Broadcasting Corporation's After
School Special on October 4, 1972. It won an Emmy Award for Outstanding
Achievement in Children's Programming in 1973.
Fred made incalculable contributions to natural history in Ontario. His love of
nature started as a very young boy with an interest in butterflies, and later
birds, in his hometown of Port Burwell. In what might almost be considered
heresy for any Canadian boy of that era, Fred traded a pair of his skates and a
bicycle pump for his first butterfly guide - obviously it was clear pretty
early on where his priorities lay. His correspondence on natural history
matters stretches back even to a personal relationship with W.E. Saunders, the
legendary London-area naturalist of the late-19th and early 20th centuries and
one of Fred's early heroes. In the summer of 1949, Fred discovered the first
Hooded Warbler nest for Canada at Springwater Conservation Area near Aylmer. In
the 1960s and 1970s, Fred was a much-sought leader of worldwide ornithological
tours. Fred's own lifetime of personal ornithological records were heavily
drawn upon in the production of a 2004 monograph "Birds of Elgin County - a
Century of Change". Fred was a long-time Director and former President
(1965-1967) of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists (now Ontario Nature), an
Honorary Director (since 1970) of the Long Point Bird Observatory and Bird
Studies Canada, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the James L. Baillie
Memorial Fund for Ornithology (1975-1989) - very appropriate, since Jim Baillie
had been a friend of his for several decades. Fred was one of the
longest-serving members of the Brodie Club (since 1953), the Toronto
Ornithological Club (since 1949; becoming an honorary member in 2002) and the
Ontario Field Ornithologists (since 1983) at the time of his death, and he
always thoroughly enjoyed the meetings of each of these clubs, where he was
still a regular attendee into the summer of this year. True to Fred's style and
sense of whimsy, his 90th birthday party was held in a park that featured a
tour of the Bracebridge, Ontario sewage lagoons. Among many speeches made after
a walk around the lagoons, Fred delivered the line of the day when he finished
his speech with the line "Oh, to be 80 again ! .....".
There is likely no better way to describe Fred's novels than by using his own
words: "The major part of my work has been novels linking human and animal
characters in a fiction format with strong natural history content and
wilderness backgrounds. The nature storyteller who uses birds or mammals in
fictional situations treads a narrow path if he wishes to be scientifically
authentic and portray them as they really are. On the one hand, he has to
personalize his animal as well as his human characters or he simply has no
dramatic base for his story. Yet if the personalizing of animal characters goes
too far and begins turning them into furry or feathered people - the nature
writer's sin of anthropomorphism - the result is maudlin nonsense that is
neither credible fable nor fiction. I enjoy the challenge of presenting
wildlife characters as modern animal behaviour studies are showing them to be -
creatures dominated by instinct, but not enslaved by it, beings with
intelligence very much sub-human in some areas yet fascinatingly super-human in
others. Out of the blending of human and animal stories comes the theme that I
hope is inherent in all my books: that man is an inescapable part of all
nature, that its welfare is his welfare, that to survive he cannot continue
acting and regarding himself as a spectator looking on from somewhere outside."
I cannot envision capturing the essence of Fred's writing more completely or
eloquently. The impact of Fred's writing, particularly that of Last of the
Curlews, was equally as influential as Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac
(1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) in the stirring up of a
collective ecological conscience among society that gave impetus and urgency to
the popular post-War environmental movement. One of my favourite pieces of
Fred's writing is an article entitled "Why Wilderness?", a call to arms for
enlightened wilderness preservation, which was published in the December 1967
issue of The Ontario Naturalist. Here is one of my favourite passages:
"Conservationists are not trying to stop progress, or to halt further
development of soil and forest resources; but if we believe that man's heritage
includes not only the works of man but also the works of creation, we have an
obligation to the future to ensure that good samples of creation's multiformity
of natural patterns are preserved. To argue that wilderness preservation is
ludicrous because we already have too much Canadian wilderness is like arguing
that we don't need to preserve our Tom Thomsons or Krieghoffs because we have
galleries full of other paintings." Perhaps the most telling fact that I
could share about Fred's life is that among the many hundreds of friends and
acquaintances that I have shared with Fred over our friendship of several
decades, I have never heard a single one of them utter anything but praise and
admiration for his knowledge, wisdom, infectious inquisitiveness, sense of both
humour and fairness, and his love for family, community, birds and the
environment. That truly is the exemplary hallmark of a life well lived. Fred
passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 15th at Toronto's Scarborough
General Hospital. I learned the intricacies of shorebird identification
leaning heavily on books crafted by men named Fuertes, Forbush, Peterson and
Godfrey, but fully comprehending them as "minute specks of earthbound flesh
challenging an eternity of earth and sky" was a gift bestowed on me by Fred
Bodsworth. A fond adieu to my friend Fred - he will be dearly missed by
countless friends and fans alike. Glenn CoadyWhitby, Ontario Please join Fred's
family and friends at Kerr Park in Bracebridge for a brunch and hike in his
honour on Sunday, October 7th at 9:00 a.m. To reach Kerr Park and the
Bracebridge sewage lagoons, take Highway 11 north to just south of Bracebridge
and exit at Exit 182 onto Regional Road 118 (Ecclestone Drive), taking it
northwest 4.2 km to Regional Road 16 (Beaumont Drive). Turn left (west) onot
Beaumont Drive and proceed 0.6 km west to the entrance to Kerr Park on the
south side.
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