Nature Notes: A Naturalist, Mentor, and Inspiration
I would not be here today writing about nature if it weren’t for my mentor, Paul Stoutenburgh. In the mid-1950s when I was a teen growing up next to the potato fields in the Oregon part of Mattituck, my mother turned my attention to a small notice in the Mattituck Watchman-Long Island Traveler. It said that a man named Paul would be showing slides of birds at a local church. After a very snowy winter of feeding birds (rather than shooting them with my Daisy BB gun) with old pieces of bread in my backyard and watching them feed with the naked eye from my second-story window, I was eager to learn more about them and so went to the slide show.
It was the beginning of a long and prosperous tutelage under Paul Stoutenburgh’s watchful eye. At the time Paul was married to Barbara Silleck, who contributed equally to my development as a budding naturalist. Paul took me under his wing and I spent many a great day with him watching birds, photographing them, and learning about the local ecosystems: salt marshes, coastal ponds, woodlands, old fields, and such. His primary bailiwick was Long Island Sound, Mattituck Inlet, the Peconic Bays, and their creeks and inlets from Orient Point to west of Riverhead and the South Fork.
How Paul got started photographing nature is a mystery to me. I know that he took up photography at a young age and took his Leica with him on a naval vessel in the Pacific in World War II. Near New Guinea his ship was torpedoed and went down, Paul managed to save himself and, luckily, his camera.
When he returned to the States his camera was by his side and stayed by his side until he got another, then another, as film cameras and their lenses became more and more sophisticated. One of my first treks with Paul was to Quogue, where he had found a killdeer nest in a field in mid-March. From that moment on, I played a valuable role in his photographic pursuits. He would build a makeshift blind close to a nest, come back a few days later with me, and set up to shoot the nester. There were no telephoto lenses readily available in those days, so the blind had to be but a few feet from the nest.
The killdeer spooked. We both entered the blind and sat for a short spell, confident that Mrs. Killdeer knew that someone was near her nest. The next step was brilliantly staged by Paul. I would leave the blind in an obvious fashion and walk away about 200 yards with the hope that she was watching me leave. I sat down and watched from afar. In about 15 minutes she came back and started brooding her eggs, but I couldn’t tell from my faraway vantage point. In an hour or so, Paul stood up outside the blind. “Did you get some good shots,” I asked. “Yes, indeed,” he replied.
Things got tricky when he found a yellow-crowned night heron breeding in a pine tree in Aquebogue. He constructed a tree blind and we pulled the same dog-and-pony trick: We both went up the tree. I got down and hid a distance away. Paul was able to get some magnificent close-ups of the heron.
Paul was also a Christmas bird counter. I went on my first count, the Central Suffolk Count in December of 1952. There were only a handful of us, but most were tried-and-true birders. They were the big five of East End birders at the time. None of them were academic scientists, but they were prodigious observers, data recorders, and writers. Gil Raynor was a meteorologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he used an old-fashioned telescope but was as adept at following the flight of birds in the air with it as spotting them roosting or on the ground. He published scientific papers about bird migration in The Auk and other ornithological journals.
Dennis Puleston, an author and public relations person at the Brookhaven Lab, sailed across the Pacific Ocean in a smallish boat. Later he wrote and published a very fine “Natural History of Long Island.” The Long Island duck farmer Roy Wilcox — he worked the South Bays part of the count — was also a writer, and compiled a natural history of Southampton Town among other works. He was also a bird-bander and the Long Island authority on the piping plover and its nesting habits. Art Cooley graduated from Cornell University and taught biology and other subjects at Bellport High School. He led many, many high schoolers into natural history and the environment in the way that Paul did with me.
At that time, along with Paul, and following in the footsteps of the great Roy Latham, an Orient potato farmer, who was self-taught in all phases of natural history, they made up the core of Suffolk County’s active natural historians during the last half of the 20th century.
Paul and I would also go duck hunting together. Set out decoys, sit in a blind on Nassau Point and watch the winter waterfowl skim the waters of Peconic Bay. Many naturalists, conservationists, and environmentalists started out as hunters. Just think for a moment of John James Audubon and Theodore Roosevelt. They both traveled the Americas, often on foot, and shot their specimens in order to collect them for museums and illustrations.
Early on, long before there was email and digital cameras, Paul said that print was fated to be replaced by pictures, namely photographs, and in a way he was right. Ironically, perhaps, Paul was as good in print as behind the camera. But he had the help of his able assistant and wife and co-writer, Barbara, who knew how to spell and type with both hands. He (and Barbara) began writing a weekly column, “Focus on Nature,” in the Riverhead News-Review in 1951. It became a mainstay in the Suffolk Times published by Troy Gustavson. He wrote more than 2,500 nature columns, replete with photographs, covering flora and fauna, fish and fowl, herbs and trees, land and water. His last was printed in 2011. For a short time his column was carried in The Southampton Press, as well.
He was the first nature columnist on Long Island. Back from the Army and Japan in 1961, Paul let me write one of his columns and I guess I was smitten. Nowadays three East End newspapers, The East Hampton Star, The Southampton Press, and The East Hampton Press run a weekly nature column. In 2013 Dave Taft began a biweekly nature column in The New York Times Metropolitan section.
Above all, Paul was an ardent environmentalist, working to preserve wetlands at a time when Suffolk County and the Army Corps of Engineers were dredging waterways helter-skelter and putting the dredged materials on wetland vegetation. He started the North Fork Environmental Council, which preceded the Group for the South Fork, which ultimately became Group for the East End. Long before the Long Island Nature Conservancy had paid staff, Paul was one of the conservancy’s most strenuous volunteers, saving land here and there, relying on the good will of people who donated it.
He was also a director for the Peconic Land Trust, helping to preserve farmland. As a member of the Big Five, he helped bring Suffolk County into the environmental limelight by starting and working with organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife in order to get DDT — the mosquito-control agent of choice and the farmer’s right hand in battling the Colorado potato beetle —banned in the county. While a shop teacher at Greenport High School, he started a summer nature workshop program for Southold youth involving seining creeks and coves and other nature studies.
After the DDT era, Paul and others began putting up artificial nesting poles for the osprey population, which had been reduced to less than 20 breeding pairs on Long Island by DDT and other toxins in the food chain. He, Gil Raynor, Dennis Puleston, and I overnighted on Gardiner’s Island in the 1970s to study the breeding bird fauna while I was at Southampton College. We visited Robins Island more than once, and Paul led the fight to protect it. Most of it is now managed by the Nature Conservancy. He studied mammals and marine organisms with me on Mashomack during the formulation of the Mashomack Preserve Master Plan.
Paul was the compiler of the Orient Christmas Bird Count, started by Roy Latham, for more than 30 years. For a long time, he served as a Southold Town trustee where he made deep environmental inroads. He also was a town councilman for a term or two. Paul traveled widely with his wife and family, e.g., to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec to study the breeding of gannets and other marine birds. In June 2013, the Southold Town Board named the Hashamomuck Pond Nature Preserve in his honor.
On July 15, after a long bout with Parkinson’s Disease, Paul passed away. His body, in keeping with a long-held commitment, was given to Stony Brook University. Southold will celebrate his life and life’s work on Saturday in the Southold High School auditorium. He is survived by his wife, Barbara, who carries on his work and his love of nature and the environment, and by three children. A grandchild, Paul II, is a wildlife videographer working to protect rainforests around the world.
What-ifs. What if Paul hadn’t survived the sinking ship in World War II? What if he hadn’t saved his Leica camera, as well?
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].