BBC Snippets

Link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/bristol-birds/02-2008/msg00004.html

Aug 12, 1995 The Bristol Bird Club held an invitational field trip to South Holston Lake. Dr. Stephen M. Russell, for whom our club was named in the summer of 1990, came home to his old bird club for the first time in nearly 45 years. Few members had met him. Twenty-five birders were on hand to go birding with Dr. Russell and his wife Ruth.

She served on the national board of directors of the National Audubon Society and was president of the 4,000 member Tucson Audubon Society.

Dr. Russell was curator of birds at the University of Arizona museum and secretary of the American Ornithologists'Union.

Together Steve and Ruth had banded 15,000 birds in five years of research in Arizona.

In 1964, his graduate research became the first A.O.U. Monograph: A Distributional Study of the Birds of British Honduras (now Belize). This was his doctoral dissertation in ornithology under Dr. George H. Lowrey, Jr. at Louisiana State University. A.O.U. has since published 61 additional monographs. Russell also teamed with William H. Baltosser in 2000 to write the Black-chinned Hummingbird for the species monographs in the Birds of North America series. In 1996 he wrote the account for the Anna's Hummingbird.

In 1965 he was chosen an elective member of A.O.U. He was also named an honorary member of the Cooper's Ornithological Society.

In 2001 Steve and Ruth wrote The North American Banders' Manual for Banding Hummingbirds. Point Reyes Station: North American Banding Council. He teamed with William Davis to write Finding Birds in Southeast Arizona. With Gale Monson, he was the lead author of The Birds of Sonora, a book from his decades of study conducted in the dessert of Mexico just south of Arizona.

The BBC established the "Stephen M. Russell Graduate Lectureship" for Ph.D. students in ornithological studies.

In 1953, Russell discovered the fall migration of hawks along Clinch Mountain near Hayter's Gap in Southwest Virginia. He was a founder and charter member of BBC as a high school student at Abingdon, Va. His mother drove him to Bristol for club meetings and waited to take him home. This was before I-81 was built. He birded for a decade in Southwest Virginia until entering Virginia Tech where he earned a B.S. in biology in 1953.

As far as we know, he is the first birder to have looked for birds at South Holston Lake and also the first to have made field notes. He published his finding in The Migrant, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1951, p 19. Fred M. Jones birded and kept records and published bird notes from the area two decades before the reservoir was created but was not living in the region when the lake was built and filled.

Construction of South Holston Dam had been completed and the gates closed to fill the reservoir on Nov 20, 1950.

Feb 11, 1951, Russell first birded South Holston Lake to check for waterbirds. He wrote to Dr. Henry M. Stevenson, the famous ornithologist at Florida State University, that he found the water backed up about 3/4 miles upstream from the state line. He wrote of waterfowl being seen on one side of the line or the other which puts him in the vicinity of the mouth of Spring Creek near what is now Musick's Campground. He donated a carbon copy of his correspondence with Stevenson to the BBC archives. His waterfowl list until early March 1951 was impressive. It including Mallards, Black Ducks, Canvasbacks, Lesser Scaup, American Golden-eye, Common Merganser, Red-breasted Merganser, Hooded Merganser, Old Squaw (Long-tailed Duck), Baldpates (American Wigeon), Bufflehead, Pintail, Wood Duck, Ring-billed Gull and Herring Gull.

The Russells have several times returned to the area and stayed with and visited with old friends in Abingdon. He attended the Virginia Society of Ornithology state meeting at Breaks Interstate Park in early May 2006.

From the archives of the Bristol Bird Club