Rollo Beck

Rollo Howard Beck (26 August 1870 - 22 November 1950) was an American ornithologist, bird collector and explorer. Beck's Petrel is named after him.

Early years

Rollo Howard Beck was born in Los Gatos, California, and grew up in Berryessa working on apricot and prune orchards. He completed only 8th grade education, but took an early interest in natural history, trapping gophers after school on neighborhood farms. One of his neighbors, Frank H. Holmes, was a good friend of the ornithologist T. S. Palmer. Palmer also introduced Beck to Charles A. Keeler, who studied birdlife of the San Francisco Bay area, and Beck learned about upland birds hunting quail with Holmes. Beck’s interest and knowledge of birds grew, and he soon learned how to make ornithological specimens and mount birds for museum collections. He joined the American Ornithologists' Union in 1894, and was among the first members of the newly-formed Cooper Ornithological Society which formed in San Jose, California. He participated in early ornithological expeditions to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe with Holmes and W. H. Osgood, and collected and helped describe the first eggs and nests of the Western Evening Grosbeak and Hermit Warbler.

Expeditions

California Channel Islands

In the spring of 1897, Beck headed south to Santa Barbara, California, where he learned to sail a moderate-sized schooner under captain Sam Burtis. He visited the islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel, collecting and documenting birds as well as nests and eggs. Beck was the first to collect and document the differences of the Island Scrub-jays that live on the Channel Islands of California, now recognized as distinct from mainland forms.

Galapagos Islands

Later in 1897, while on his way back to the Sierras, Beck was invited to join an ornithological expedition to the Galápagos Islands organized by Frank Blake Webster and funded by Lord Walter Rothschild, of Tring, England. The expedition was launched to study and collect giant tortoises and the land birds of the Galápagos, and here Beck also polished his sailing skills and became better acquainted with seabirds and the unique fauna of the Galapagos. Beck returned again to the Galápagos to collect more specimens around 1901, and he personally delivered these specimens to Lord Rothschild in Tring. While in Tring, he planned future potential collecting trips to Colombia for Rothschild, and he returned to California by way of Washington, DC, in order to apply for the necessary permits.

Cocos and Galapagos

Back in San Francisco, Beck met with Leverett Mills Loomis, Director of the California Academy of Sciences. Loomis was interested in seabirds (especially Procellariiformes), and hired Beck to collect in Monterey Bay, the Channel Islands, and the Revillagigedo Islands of Mexico, while he waited for his Colombia permits. In 1905-1906, Beck was hired by the California Academy of Sciences to organize and lead a large sea-going expedition to Cocos Island and the Galápagos Islands aboard the Schooner “Academy.” He organized scientific specialists on botany, herpetology, entomology, and malacology, as well as ornithology. Together they created the most important scientific records and surveys of the region ever done, leading to our great understanding of the biota of the region. The great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire struck while Beck was at sea, so their collections and the schooner “Academy” acted as the meeting place and storage place for the California Academy of Sciences for several months after their return, and some historians believe that had Beck not been out to sea and collecting, the Academy would have suffered a lethal blow.

Beck married his wife and lifelong companion, Ida Menzies of Berryessa, in 1907. He went to work for Joseph Grinnell, the Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1908, and collected waterbirds for Grinnell’s studies of California birds. Before long, Beck was offered even more money by Dr Leonard C. Sanford, of New Haven, Connecticut, to collect birds in Alaska for the well-known ornithologist, Arthur Cleveland Bent, who was collecting for his studies of “The Life Histories of North American Birds”. He did much of the field work with the young Alexander Wetmore, who had recently graduated from college.

Brewster-Sanford Expedition to South America

In 1912, Dr Sanford proposed a larger two-year expedition (that ended up taking five years) to South America for Rollo and Ida, and financed by Mr F. F. Brewster. They traveled up into lakes and highlands of the Andes, along the coast, and out at sea to the Falkland Islands and Juan Fernández Islands, sailed around Cape Horn in a 12-ton cutter, and up into the Caribbean. This work and these collections proved invaluable to Robert Cushman Murphy, who later published “The Oceanic Birds of South America” [Murphy, Robert Cushman. (1936). The Oceanic Birds of South America. American Museum of Natural History.] based in part on the Brewster-Sanford Expedition collection of Rollo Beck.

Whitney South Seas Expedition

In 1920 Beck was contacted by Dr Sanford who proposed an extended South Pacific expedition. The fieldwork was funded by Harry Payne Whitney of New York, and the specimens were bound for the American Museum of Natural History. This became the longest and greatest of all Beck’s expeditions and, as with the "Academy" expeditions, he was joined by many other accomplished biologists with complementary skills, including E. H. Quayle, J. G. Correia, Dr F. P. Drowne, Hannibal Hamlin, Guy Richards, Ernst Mayr, E. H. Bryan Jr., and others. Beck left the expedition in 1929, after sailing through the Pacific, from Tahiti to New Guinea to New Zealand and visiting hundreds of islands between. Rollo and Ida Beck returned to the California in 1929 with over 40,000 bird skins and a large anthropological collection. This expedition remains to this day the most comprehensive survey and study of birds in the south-west Pacific islands, and has been written up in dozens of important scientific monographs of birds. The specimens residing at the American Museum form the most comprehensive collection of Pacific birds anywhere.

Rollo and Ida Beck retired to Northern California, where they continued to study natural history and provide specimens of great scientific value. Most of these later specimens are housed at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, and at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley. There is a smaller but very beautiful collection of mounted specimens on exhibit at the Pacific Grove Museum, in the town of Pacific Grove, California.

Contributions to Science

The work of Beck and other early ornithologists was undertaken primarily to document biodiversity before it was lost forever [Chapman, Frank M. (1935). "The Whitney South Seas Expedition." Science 81(2091):95-97.] without being recorded, and to understand the evolution and ecology of the regions. The work of Beck and others brought an awareness of and a catalog of our biodiversity that is essential to have in order to do modern conservation. Much of what we know about Western US birds and Pacific ornithology - from Bent's "Life Histories of North American Birds" to Murphy's "Oceanic Birds of South America" rests on the work of Rollo Beck and other early ornithologists like him. Our understanding of biodiversity and our modern conservation biology, much of which seems to be anti-collecting, owes much to these early collectors who worked so diligently to document and preserve voucher specimens of our wildlife.

Controversy

Human history is replete with examples of island species that were being persecuted by farmers, ranchers, hunters, sailors; were being harvested unsustainably; and were being decimated by introduced species [Quammen, David. (1997). The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1997] . By comparison, scientific collectors were relatively few in number and seldom took large numbers of specimens of any one species, but competition between museums and private collectors to acquire the rarest of the rare put disproportionate collecting pressure on species whose populations were teetering on the brink.

Rollo Beck has been vilified for having collected a sample of Guadalupe Caracaras in 1900 which were being exterminated by goat herders who viewed the bird as a predator. [Bousman, William G. (2005). "Local Ornithology in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries". Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society.] . At the time he assumed the birds were common on Guadalupe Island, but in retrospect he wrote that those he collected might have been the last [Abbott, C. B. (1933). Closing history of the Guadalupe Caracara. Condor 35:10-15] . Beck also collected three of the last four individuals of the subspecies of Galápagos tortoise "Geochelone nigra abingdonii", which is native to the Galápagos Islands.

References

External links

* [http://www.calacademy.org/research/anthropology/rollobeck/ The Pacific Voyages of Rollo Beck]
* [http://www.montereyseabirds.com/RolloBeckBio.htm Rollo Beck biography]
* [http://www.pgmuseum.org/beck/index%7E1.htm Rollo Beck online exhibit of the Pacific Grove Museum]