BirdCapeMay.org

PETE DUNNE
The Early Years

Sometime in the late 1980s, one groggy Sunday morning in May after a “World Series of Birding” event, I was standing next to Pete Dunne at the Beanery when he pointed out a distant speck, invisible to the naked eye but just a slightly larger speck even in a good spotting scope, and called it a Mississippi Kite. At that point I had never seen one within 500 miles of New Jersey, and though I’d known Pete for a over decade and watched him pull some amazing birds out of his magic hat, I was pretty dubious. How could he be so sure, with seemingly nothing apparent to identify the bird by, and surrounded by a crowd of mostly-doubting northern New Jerseyans? As the minutes wore on the speck got bigger and bigger, gradually convincing most onlookers, and then me, that it was indeed an immature Mississippi Kite, which soon sailed overhead, ruddering its tail.

Long-time director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, author of eleven books and innumerable articles on birding and related topics, lecturer, optics authority, cosmopolitan trip leader, Pete has an international reputation in the birding world.

He lives with his wife Linda in the old shipping village of Mauricetown, in Cumberland County, and he is just finishing up the book Prairie Spring, to be published by Houghton Mifflin next spring.

RR: I know you grew up in Whippany, in northern New Jersey. Were you born there?
PD: I was born in All Souls Hospital in Morristown. And early on I lived with my family in Convent Station, on Canterbury Lane, where my grandparents—my father’s parents—had a great big brick house with white pillars, which is still there along with the other large houses I remember; and we lived in the carriage house in the back.

RR: Early memories?
PD: I can remember that I was allowed out in the neighborhood by myself at age 4 or 5, out of my parents’ sight, something that never happens nowadays. The house backed up on a big woods, which my grandfather owned, but where we weren’t supposed to go.

And when we moved to an area in Whippany which was near Bee Meadows*, I remember negotiating with my parents to be allowed out as far as the power-line cut which crossed the swamp, and later I could go to the ponds by the old brickyard…and in retrospect it’s a marvel that I survived, falling through the ice on the ponds several times, and using sixty-gallon drums cut sidewise as boats, which were amazingly unstable. It was a great playground, and I became intimate at an early age with woodlands.

(*Part of the large wetland complex created by glacial Lake Passaic—of which Great Swamp, Black Meadows, Troy Meadows, Hatfield Swamp, and Great Piece Meadows are a part—which has been a magnet for birders and naturalists for over a century.-RR)

RR: I was born in Nevada, and even though we moved to New Jersey when I was six, I still feel like I’m back home when I’m in a desert, particularly in the Southwest. Do you get that?
PD: I still regard the eastern deciduous forest as home, no matter how much I travel. Driving east across Iowa or Illinois, I start seeing hills and breathe deep and sometimes I get a whiff and know that I’ll be home soon.

RR: So you had the great fortune to grow up around Troy Meadows.
PD: I think by the time I was 11, fifth or six grade, I had the latitude, and the physical strength, to go into Troy, which was a long walk. I later hunted there in my teens, and really gained a deep knowledge through that and looking at birds and just being out in the woods.

RR: You could actually get Ruffed Grouse around Troy Meadows back then.
PD: My first grouse was actually in my backyard, and the first grouse I ever shot was near the third Brickyard Pond.

RR: The grouse are now long gone, along with the forest understory that grouse like, which the deer have eaten.
PD: I haven’t seen a grouse there in over twenty years…but now there’s turkey, and that’s amazing…when I was a kid never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever see Wild Turkey in my woods.

RR: Now they’re in places like Rahway, and Linden…
PD: I remember Floyd Wolfarth taking me to see my first turkey along Old Mine Road in Warren County, to Oley’s place, who always ranted about the government and the National Park Service, which was buying all the land around there for the National Recreation Area.

RR: Any early memories of birds?
PD: My first conscious memory of birds was when I was about four years old; there was a blizzard, and I remember my mother throwing bread out on the snow—I can still see that bread—and my memory is of myriads of multicolored birds, including blues and reds (even though cardinals were probably not in that area yet)—this magical aviary of birds, to be looking out the window and seeing them.

RR: When do you remember actively looking for birds?
PD: I was seven, and there was a neighborhood girl named Donna, two years older than I was, and her grandparents had given her a bird book—one of those Golden Guides with robins on the cover—and seven-power binoculars. I know they were sevens because I mistakenly thought they were better because they were more powerful than the ones I had, which were actually 6x25 Zeisses brought back from the war…great binoculars.

RR: And you actually went out on a trip to see birds?
PD: We got up early one morning before dawn—because we knew that the early bird caught the worm—and we went back in the woods and just stood there waiting for it to get light. No idea what to do. Over time we recorded each new bird in a brown notebook, which I still have, dating to 1961 and for some reason we wrote our lists down according to season, certainly not in AOU order. We collected nests, animal skulls, snake skins, and had a little museum in her house. So we birded together until she was eleven and her father told her she couldn’t go back into the woods with me, which I didn’t understand at all at the time.

RR: Were your parents encouraging your interests?
PD: My parents would have preferred that I be involved in organized sports, or some other group activity but I abhorred structure, didn’t enjoy sports, and they worried…but they eventually let me go my own way and never really forced me into things.

RR: You went to Whippany Park High and what was called Newark State College at the time (now Kean University). What did you study?
PD: Political science.

RR: Why? No biology?
PD: I did take a bunch of biology courses, but I remember getting a C in ecology because I hated the professor, and I just generally disliked school.

RR: So Earth Day had come and gone and the subject was somewhat in the air, and you knew a little about birds…probably more than a little.
PD: I always was a birder, and on top of that a hunter, which I think gave me a deeper-than-average intimacy with the natural world. Shortly after college I really got revitalized about birding.

RR: I remember something about your working as a carpet installer at the time…
PD: In 1974, a girlfriend I was living with named Susan Taylor, also got interested in birds. One time when I was working, she borrowed my bird book and binoculars and drove down on her own to Cape Hatteras—in a Datsun SSS I still remember well. When she came back I was jealous of what she’d seen, so we drove back the next weekend, to Cape Hatteras…and this was long before I’d ever been in Cape May…it was in December 1974, camping somewhere south of Bodie Island in a new North Face tent…I remember a flock of Snow Geese going over, birds I’d seen only once before, and we had bunches of life birds.

RR: What field guide were you using?
PD: At that point I was using the Robbins* guide—a book which I think has gotten short shrift over the years—and the next year, in 1975, I drove to Cape Hatteras in my ‘72 VW eleven times. I quit the carpet installing job—couldn’t stand my co-worker—and I had saved up enough money, and I just went bird watching; would wake up one morning and say I’m going birding at Hatteras, or wherever, and go.

* Chandler Robbins, Bertel Brun, and Herbert Zim, Birds of North America (1966).

RR: And you didn’t know any other birders?
PD: No, but I was getting a lot of life birds at Hatteras, some pretty good ones, though all I had was binoculars. I think my life Common Eider was in May under the bridge at Hatteras; it had one wing.

RR: How did you meet Tom Halliwell?
PD: I was birding in Troy Meadows at the time. By then I had learned that Troy was a really good place for birds, and I knew it pretty well from hunting…Tom was teaching in one of the Parsippany high schools by that time. And through him, in May ’75, I started to learn about the larger birding community…But mainly I still birded on my own.

Also in that period I had decided to go to the University of Alaska. I wanted to study birds…thought that to do that you had to get advanced degrees in ornithology…And then I found out when I went up there that they wanted to put me in the undergraduate program, and had given me a roommate that I didn’t want…I finally realized that I really didn’t want to go back to school—that I hated regimented education.

When I got back home I went to Hawk Mountain, had a terrific day, and realized that this is what I really wanted to do—watch hawks. I drove to Hawk Mountain from Whippany practically every day for two weeks.

RR: When did you first go up to Raccoon Ridge?
PD: In the fall of 1975 Susan Taylor and I picked up a copy of Donald Heinztelman’s Autumn Hawk Flights—which I think had just come out—at the Old Book Store in Morristown, and in it were directions to Raccoon Ridge, though they were a little vague.

I went to Yards Creek near Blairstown, bushwhacked up the powerline cut, and got to the Appalachian Trail on top of the ridge and turned right on the trail instead of left. No one told me about all the Timber Rattlesnakes that were up there, though I have yet to see one there.

RR: They’re very shy. You were probably inches from one and never knew it. And a left turn would have taken you to Sunfish Pond and ultimately to the Water Gap.
PD: But luckily I turned right, and I came to this open dome-shaped area and thought, “This looks like a good place.” And it was…later hundreds of Broad-wings went over. A couple of days later, I walked north a little bit and met Floyd Wolfarth and some other people in another open area (“Little Coon”-RR). Floyd had that lousy, ratty owl decoy up, the one he’d salvaged from the garbage at the Newark Museum.

RR: Floyd always did like Little Coon better than Big Coon.
PD: Because he could drive his Jeep up the old road that led up the ridge from the scout camp.

RR: When you went to Hawk Mountain did you get to know Maurice (Braun)?
PD: I didn’t meet him then…it was later in Cape May, a place Floyd had forbidden—really, forbidden—me to go…there were hawk banders down there…who were almost as bad as hawk shooters to some people, including Floyd.

In 1976 Maurice heard rumors that unethical things were going on down in Cape May, with the hawk banding, and Maurice, being a bander, came to investigate. We heard in advance that Maurice—almost a god to us—was coming, and when later he showed up and I introduced myself, I didn’t let on that I knew who he was, and I toyed with him a bit. He didn’t see any problems and was impressed with the hawk totals we were getting (which many people didn’t believe at first). He saw the huge numbers of hawks—Sharpies and Merlins everywhere—and became a believer.

RR: I remember you went back to Raccoon the next spring.
PD: And the spring before. I did the spring 1976 hawk watch on Raccoon Ridge. Floyd was so proud of me—his protégé—that he took me to the Urner Club’s Annual Dinner in April, and I remember I had this terrific sunburn from two months of hawk-watching without sunscreen, and I must have looked like a Native American in an uncomfortable new blue suit.

RR: Did you get any money for that groundbreaking hawkwatch?
PD: I think it was something like $350 from New Jersey Audubon, who also published my first paper on the hawkwatch results. And after that I went to the Cape May Bird Observatory, where Bill Clark was running the place on a shoestring, I think he had about $10,000 to run it for the fall of ’77.

RR: Tell me a little bit about the first days of the Cape May hawk watch—was that famous lifeguard chair there the first year?
PD: That was the next year. I got down to Cape May a few days before its official start. I really didn’t know anything or anyone, and the first person I met was Kate Braithwaite. The first day of the watch I stood all day on a sawed off telephone pole, which gave me a view over the phragmites but didn’t do much for my legs. That night I built a little stand out of 2x4s and put it where the picnic shelter is now, and I stood all year on that stand…8 to 10 hours a day; 7 days a week.

I met Harold Axtel that year, and John Danzenbaker, Bob Dittrick, Jim Aikers…Clay Sutton; and Ernie Choate came by from time to time. Everyone left in October and I was pretty much on my own ‘til the watch ended in November.

I stayed down after the count…house sitting on Pearl Avenue and living on Borden Food Products like Tastykakes, Yodels, and other stuff brought by Susan Taylor, whose father worked for the company that made them. Canned beef ravioli and cheese ravioli were a staple…instant coffee only; and I didn’t eat lunch…

That time was the best year in my life.

RR: N.J. Audubon had always had its fall weekends; were you involved with those early on?
PD: In 1976 CMBO hosted the fall weekend, and by 1978, I was running the weekend, when we used the old Christian Admiral Hotel as the weekend’s headquarters.

RR: How was Cape May Bird Observatory doing at the time?
PD: CMBO made arrangements with the Wetlands Institute for a room there to keep our stuff, but in ‘78 they hired a bird person to be on staff and we were invited to leave…The corkboard with “CMBO” engraved into its frame used to sit over my desk at the Wetlands Institute and you can still see it today at the Northwood Center.

I worked out of Lorrimer Nature Center in Franklin Lakes in December, January, and February of ‘78-’79, lived at my folks’, and wrote up my reports.

I went back down to Anne Northwood’s at Lily Lake at Cape May Point in 1979…leased her unheated sunroom, and CMBO reopened in March. We had a space heater, an answering machine, my old Olympia typewriter, and a percolator, and I’d sit in the office bundled up with like seven or eight sweaters trying to keep warm…CMBO stayed open all year after 1979.

This is the first of a two-part article.