The Bum Chums, one of Sweet Briar’s tap clubs, will host its annual bazaar from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 1 in Prothro Atrium and Josey Dining Room. The event will benefit the Bum Chum Scholarship.

This year’s event will have a “Winter Wonderland” theme and is being billed as a one-stop shop for all of your holiday purchases. There will be holiday music, including Christmas carols sung by the Sweet Tones, and candy canes and other festive accoutrements.

Vendors include, among others, Stella and Dot (jewelry), Carol Schofield (jewelry), Preppy Palooza (dog collars, leashes, key chains, headbands, etc.), Chocolates R Us, Pillow Mint (home accents), Class of 2012 (key chains, etc.), and Shay’s Unique Gifts (painted wine glasses and cups, flip flops, jewelry, handbags and accessories).

Admission is free and it is open to the public. Parking is available behind Protho Hall. The $1,000 scholarship will be awarded to a deserving student by the Student Government Association. For more information, contact Alexis Hart at hart11@sbc.edu or (860) 967-2635.

Johnston’s Team Wins Briar Bowl

A team led by Sweet Briar College librarian Lisa Johnston won the Briar Bowl on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at Le Bistro. At the semi-annual trivia contest, which is hosted by the Academic Resource Center, 15 teams representing a wide range of academic disciplines, including athletics, battled it out.

The first place team included Johnston and Sarah Strapp ’10, Courtney Hurt ’10, Kate Rose ’10 and Abby Johnston ’12. The second place team was led by visiting assistant professor of history John Ashbrook and assistant professor of English Tony Lilly’s team placed third.

Dean Jonathan Green emceed the competition.

SBC Harpists Play in ‘Harps of Gold’ Benefit Concert

Four members of the Sweet Briar Community performed Sunday, Nov. 1 in “Harps of Gold,” a benefit concert for the Wednesday Music Club, a Charlottesville group that funds scholarships for young musicians.

The concert featured Virginia Schweninger, harp instructor at SBC, and her ensemble, Harp Songs of the Blue Ridge, playing golden harps made in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The ensemble also includes Sweet Briar senior Caroline Rainey and Becky Edmondson, who works in the dean’s office.

Claire Wittman, the 15-year-old daughter of associate professor of theater Loretta Wittman, also performed. She sang “Ave Maria,” accompanied by a harpist.

According to Lynn Buck, wife of SBC Dean Jonathan Green, who attended the concert, it was a “full house.”

Art History Web Site Celebrates Birthday

Christopher Witcombe’s Art History Resources on the Web, the oldest and most visited art history Web site in the world, celebrated its 14th birthday on Saturday, Oct. 24.

According to Witcombe, a Google search for “art history” has ranked the Web site in first place for more than 10 years. The Web site receives more than 20,000 page views per day and more than seven million per year. Art History Resources was praised as one of the “Best of the Web” by Forbes magazine and has been the recipient of numerous awards.

Most recently, it was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for inclusion on the NEH Web site, EDSITEment, as “one of the best online resources for education in the humanities.” It is listed on thousands of Web sites around the world and included in many published Internet and World Wide Web research and teaching reference guides and directories.

The program’s overarching goal is to increase awareness of the need for wetlands protection, particularly vernal pools, by connecting with kindergarten through 12th-grade students and their teachers from four regional school districts. Using teacher workshops, classroom instruction and directed field trips, experts will guide students and teachers in projects to find and study vernal pools in their local areas.

The field activities and classroom lessons will be age-appropriate and are designed to meet Virginia’s Standards of Learning. But “Schools for Pools” creator, Sweet Briar naturalist-in-residence Michael Hayslett, said the program is also about encouraging the participants to “adopt” the vernal pools and become ambassadors for them in their home communities. The plan calls for the groups to present their findings to their local governments and to seek media coverage.

Vernal pools are seasonal wetlands that a variety of animal and plant species — some of them rare — depend on to survive. The ponds typically fill up in fall and winter, creating vital amphibian breeding grounds in spring, before drying out in summer.

Frogs and salamanders that live in the surrounding woods trek a half-mile or more every year to the same pool where they were born to lay eggs and raise tadpoles. Migratory waterfowl, deer and other local fauna also rely on the ponds.

Although these wetlands’ ecological importance to the species they support is well understood by biologists, the average Central Virginian may be unaware that they exist, much less that they should be valued and preserved, Hayslett said. Despite statewide legal protection, many are destroyed, often unwittingly, by filling, logging or pollution.

“The surprising thing is how many there are in this area,” Hayslett said. “They’re really quite common when you know where to look, and when to look and how to look.”

Hayslett and Sweet Briar will work with several partners on the “Schools for Pools” project, including Boxley Materials Co., Bedford County Economic Development Authority, Lynchburg College’s Claytor Nature Study Center, the Central Virginia Chapter of the Virginia Master Naturalist Program and Appomattox Court House National Historical Park.

Most are providing access to property where vernal pools are found. Others, such as the Central Virginia Master Naturalists, are volunteering time and expertise on the field trips. Participants, whose schools were selected for their proximity to wetland sites, will be students and teachers from Temperance Elementary in Amherst County, Buckingham Middle, Appomattox Middle and Staunton River High School in Bedford County.

Hayslett will provide in-class instruction at the schools, and will be assisted in the field by VMN volunteers — including four Sweet Briar students who are completing the organization’s 40-hour training program. Each class will take three field trips. One in late fall will follow the classroom visit. Students will return to the same site in the spring to observe the seasonal changes, and they will make a final excursion to a new site to compare how one wetland differs from another.

The program’s third component, the teacher training workshops, will be held at Sweet Briar. One will be held in December and another in early spring. Teachers may choose to attend either one.

Hayslett is scheduling the fall field trips, a process that was postponed due to a delay in the EPA funding disbursement. But he’s been coordinating with the schools in the meantime and is confident that that all four trips will be scheduled before the Thanksgiving break.

The work is a circa 1775-1790 woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu depicting a scene from the third chapter of the ancient Japanese classic, “The Tale of Genji.” The novel was written in the 11th century by a noblewoman and tells of the romances and adventures of its colorful hero Genji, a prince in the emperor’s court.

Goulde’s presentation is the third in a series of talks held in conjunction with exhibitions of works from the College’s permanent art collection and the final one related to “Language Arts.” Faculty or staff members lead the talks, bringing to the discussion a perspective of the works from their own areas of interest and expertise.

“The focus is on the interesting story behind the images,” said SBC galleries director Karol Lawson, who organized the series with the aim of bringing visitors from both on and off campus into Pannell who are not regular patrons.

“Sometimes people are intimidated by art history,” she said. “With these informal gallery talks, I hope visitors will realize that they can learn about art while they’re also enjoying thrilling stories of derring-do, drama, romance, skullduggery.”

For more information, please contact Lawson at or Ext. 6248.

Higher Education
Lynchburg News & Advance
Sept. 21, 2009
Re: Endowed faculty chairs announced.

Julie Andrews the subject of SBC student’s senior directorial project
Nelson County Times
Sept. 24, 2009
Re: “Julie Andrews Musical Tribute,” directed by Sandi Prentice ‘10

Sweet Briar College’s 10th President Inaugurated
Amherst New Era-Progress
Sept. 30, 2009

Sweet Briar dancers to take the stage
Waynesboro News Virginian
Oct. 5, 2009

Musical Tribute
Lynchburg News & Advance
Oct. 7, 2009
Re: “Julie Andrews Musical Tribute,” directed by Sandi Prentice ‘10

Creating Craniums: Sweet Briar to host VCCA artist
Waynesboro News Virginian
Oct. 7, 2009

Calendar Events
Lynchburg News & Advance
Oct. 9, 2009
Re: “Julie Andrews Musical Tribute,” directed by Sandi Prentice ‘10

College Event
Waynesboro News Virginians
Oct. 12, 2009
Re: Writers Series and “The Bacchae”

Sweet Briar schedules Senior Dance Concert
Lynchburg News & Advance
Oct. 15, 2009

Seniors prepare for dance concert
Amherst New Era-Progress
Oct. 15, 2009
Re: Senior Dance Concert

College Profiles
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Oct. 19, 2009
Re: 2009 Media General College Insert

Get organized to find the funds
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Oct. 19, 2009
Re: 2009 Media General College Insert

Taking time for fun
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Oct. 19, 2009
Re: 2009 Media General College Insert

Fairfax teen may have died in Korean exorcism, police say
Washington Post
Oct. 21, 2009
Re: John Goulde, religion faculty, quoted.

Will President Obama’s support help Deeds?
WSET/ABC-13
Oct. 22, 2009
Re: Steve Bragaw interviewed.

Va. police probe Korean exorcism in teen’s death
Arizona Republic
Oct. 22, 2009
Re: John Goulde, religion faculty, quoted.

Police: Va. Teen may have died in Korean exorcism
Annison (Ala.) Star
Oct. 24, 2009
Re: John Goulde, religion faculty, quoted.

Writers Series to host Tinti
Waynesboro News Virginian
Oct. 26, 2009

Obama rallies for Deeds. But will it help?
WSET/ABC-13
Oct. 27, 2009
Re: Steve Bragaw interviewed.

They’re Baaaaack: Ghost Tours Explore Sweet Haunts
Appomattox News
Oct. 27, 2009

Biologist, Best-selling Author’s View has Evolved Since Darwin
Appomattox News
Oct. 27, 2009

Rockin’ for the Smile Benefit Concert for Operation Smile
Appomattox News
Oct. 27, 2009

SBC Writers Series Welcomes Hannah Tinti Nov. 5
Appomattox News
Oct. 27, 2009

Classics Professor Discusses Homer, Plato Depictions in Art
Appomattox News
Oct. 27, 2009

SBC Museum Ghost Tours return Thursday, Sunday
Amherst New Era-Progress
Oct. 29, 2009

Biologist to talk evolution at SBC
Lynchburg News & Advance
Oct. 30, 2009

Casteen is the author of the poetry collection, “Free Union.” He lives in Earlysville, Va., and has taught at Sweet Briar since 2007. He will judge poetry entries in the contest’s high school and university/adult divisions.

Novelist Sarah Collins Honenberger, author of “Waltzing Cowboys” and “White Lies,” was selected to judge the high school and university/adult prose entries. Honenberger was a 2002 fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

The Writer’s Eye competition runs from Sept. 21 through Nov. 20 and challenges writers from third grade to adult to create an original piece of poetry or prose using artwork from the university’s art gallery as inspiration. Winning entries will appear in the 2009 Writer’s Eye anthology.

This year’s contest focuses on three exhibitions currently on display at the museum: “Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece,” “The Expanding Eye: Art Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe,” and “Abstract Photography: Selections from Glenstone.” Writers also are free to draw insight from items in the museum’s permanent collection.

For more information, visit the University of Virginia Art Museum’s Web site.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed about getting a chance to try out google wave as a course management software,” wrote government professor Steve Bragaw in his brief post.

Young posted his own story on the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog quoting Bragaw and linking to his SBC post. From there it caught the attention of several other bloggers with the headline “Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems?” Comments ensued.

So did Bragaw’s wishful thinking about Google Wave set off a brouhaha? Maybe just a small one.

You can check out Bragaw’s blog and reaction to it at http://bragaw.blog.sbc.edu/?p=1458.

Judson, a research fellow at the Imperial College London and author of the weekly online New York Times column “The Wild Side,” will present a sneak peek of the book at Sweet Briar College in her lecture, “Glad to Have Evolved.” She will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3 in Murchison Lane Auditorium at Babcock Fine Arts Center. Admission is free and open to the public.

“Dr. Tatiana” tackles the evolutionary biology of animal sex in the guise of an advice column. She answers questions like one from I Like ’Em Headless in Lisbon, who begins, “I’m a European praying mantis, and I’ve noticed I enjoy sex more if I bite my lovers’ heads off first.”

As Dr. Tatiana, Judson parlayed the serious and often strange science of evolution’s most fundamental process into a popular book and three-part television series. But she turned down her publisher’s request for a sequel. Speaking by phone from her home in London, she said she wasn’t interested in writing the same book over and over.

Her lecture will cover some aspects of the new book which, put simply, is about the planet we live on and how 4.5 billion years of life evolving on its surface transformed it from boring to awe-inspiring. Earth today, she said, has largely been built by living organisms.

The notion that biology accounts for much of Earth’s present-day geology is relatively new science. And it’s a reversal of our understanding of the primary patterns of evolution — where the geology comes first and burgeoning life adapts to survive on it. Species do evolve, of course, but it works both ways. Judson cited studies showing more than half the minerals on Earth exist as a consequence of living beings.

And that’s good, because if you think about it, she said, “A planet that never had life would be much less interesting than this one.”

Judson will touch on three of Charles Darwin’s insights — common ancestry, natural selection and sexual selection — and comment on how we understand them today.

But don’t expect Darwin to dominate the conversation, despite this year being the sesquicentennial of his “On the Origin of the Species.” Not to diminish him or the work, she said, but, “I’m interested in the current field and too much Darwin worship is a mistake. ‘Origin’ did change everything but it is also a historical document.”

The study of evolution didn’t start or end with Darwin, she notes, and if it did all rest on one man, that would be dull, too. “I think it would be quite nice to write a book about evolution without talking about Darwin,” Judson said.

She hopes people will come away with a different perspective of the planet, and a sense of wonder. There is an implicit message that if life on Earth — from the tiniest bacterium to humans — fundamentally alters the rock under our feet, there are implications for the way we live. But she isn’t interested in spelling them out.

“It’s more powerful when you come to them yourself rather than being told,” she said. “Evolutionists can be terribly bullying. I would much rather explore the wonder of the planet. It sounds a little bit mystical, but I don’t mean to be mystical. It’s just that the more I learn about the planet, the more I am amazed by it.”

Judson will sign copies of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation” following the lecture. For more information, contact jsteven@sbc.edu or call Ext. 6365. 

Danielle Delude is the new softball coach and recruiting facilitator. She came to Sweet Briar after coaching at Stonehill College for the past six years and serving as assistant coach for four years prior to taking the head coaching position.

While at Stonehill, Delude guided her teams to the highest win totals in the softball program’s history. Through her guidance, her teams excelled both on the field and in the classroom. She coached a number of all-conference teams and all-conference academic teams. In her past three seasons her teams combined for more than 60 wins.

Delude was a four-year varsity athlete for Stonehill, and she batted .260 during her 1998 senior season and led the team in RBIs. She is a member of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association.

Her first day was Oct. 5.

Jean Hazelwood
Athletics

Jean Hazelwood started on Oct. 1 as Sweet Briar’s new director of athletic facilities. She is in charge of the new 53,000-square-foot Fitness and Athletics Center, along with the Daisy Williams Gymnasium and all outdoor facilities.

Prior to coming to Sweet Briar, she was director of athletic facilities at Randolph College for four years.

Hazelwood is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where she was a member of the varsity soccer team. After graduating from R-MWC, she earned a master’s in health and physical education from East Stroudsburg University.

She interned at Brown University, where she served as an event manager for the university’s varsity athletic department. She also served as the facility and equipment manager at Vassar College, assisting in the daily operation of the athletic facilities and managing game-day operations for Vassar’s 25 varsity sports.

Operation Smile specializes in surgeries on children who have cleft palates, cleft lips or other facial deformities. They raise money to provide free medical treatment to children who cannot afford necessary surgeries that are usually performed at birth.

Rockin’ for the Smile is going to bring in three bands to raise funds and awareness for Operation Smile. Michelle Raymond, a Sweet Briar alumna, and the Michelle Raymond Band are coming from Washington, D.C. Point of Honor is coming from Lynchburg and Roanoke, and Swing and Miss is coming from Danville.

Rockin’ for the Smile is open to all Sweet Briar College students, faculty and staff, as well as the neighboring communities. Admission for non-Sweet Briar attendees is $2 per person. Limited refreshments will be available.

Please call (434) 826-9900 or e-mail catalano11@sbc.edu with any questions.

Collie, an interior decorator, is a 1979 graduate of Sweet Briar. She and her husband also collect Early American antiques.

The table, which seats 16 when the leaves are in place, will be used in the dining room at Sweet Briar House. According to Sweet Briar Museum director Christian Carr, it is thought to have been made by Duncan Phyfe in 1815 or earlier.

The chair is upholstered in crushed red velvet and has an eagle engraved at the top of the back. It was reportedly used by one of the Collies’ relatives, who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Carr said chairs of this type were given to members of the House of Representatives during the antebellum period.

Berry, who began teaching at Sweet Briar this fall, and the horse were competing together for the first time.

“Jason Berry had never met Sox In The City before saddling him for the Warrenton Horse Show and IHF Eastern Regional, but they quickly developed a partnership,” the article said.

Berry and Sox In The City also won the tri-color 3-year-old hunter division the day before the IHF, where they were first and second over fences and sixth in the under saddle, the Chronicle said.

In the background, Sweet Briar’s Lower Lake stretches to what is now a hardwood forest on the other side. In the photo it is a grassy hill, dotted with young trees.

The boy on the right holds a short fishing pole with two small-mouthed bass dangling from the line. The other, stretched lankily on the seat next to his brother, hands folded in his lap, is Ernest Preston Edwards, who would eventually be known as “Buck,” and, years later, a world-renown ornithologist and Sweet Briar’s Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Ecology.

The photo was taken in the summer of 1930, the year Eastman Kodak gave Brownie cameras — about 500,000 total — to children born in 1918, Edwards said recently. The photo was probably taken by Billy Worthington, the son of a Sweet Briar professor.

Edwards’ brother, George, who went by his middle name, Griffith, was 12 years old that year. It is he who is pictured with Edwards in the rowboat. “My brother fit in that age group and got his free camera, and immediately went on a photography spree,” Edwards said, adding that he was 10 or 11 years old at the time the photo was taken.

Now 90 and retired since 1990, Edwards is one of the College’s oldest emeritus professors and perhaps one of its best known, having been Sweet Briar’s ornithologist, or “bird man,” for decades. He now lives at Westminster Canterbury in Lynchburg, but visited campus recently to talk about his life at Sweet Briar.

When he visited campus, he brought with him a black paper photo album of images taken with Griffith’s Brownie camera. Among the photos affixed to its fragile pages, were snapshots of the family dog, a white collie called Mohini, and the cat, a striped tabby named Theodore.

There were photos of Camp Tye Brook in Lowesville, some from a visit to Monticello and images of Sweet Briar from the 1930s. One photo shows Edwards and other campus children hanging from all sides of the Williams family monument and another of him and some kids sitting in a bird bath.

Early Life at Sweet Briar

The Edwards brothers, which also included eldest brother Howard, moved to Sweet Briar in 1927. Their father was a physics professor at the College from 1927 to 1943 and their mother, a librarian. The couple had met and married in India while working as teachers under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church.

Edwards’ father, also named Ernest, grew up a Southern Baptist in Darlington, S.C. He wanted to “roam around the world,” Edwards said, an opportunity the Baptists weren’t offering at the time. So, he hooked up with the Presbyterians and traveled to India, where he met and married Mabel Griffith, of Utica, N.Y.

Three of the couple’s four children were born in India, including a daughter, Ruth Cary, who died when she was a year old. Edwards describes his mother as quiet and unassuming, and believes she never completely got over losing her daughter and having to leave her buried so far away.

Edwards has fond memories of growing up at Sweet Briar, first at Faculty Row No. 4, then down the street at No. 6. His mother would cook food with curry powder, perhaps a carryover from her time in India, and he and Griffith would play basketball and field hockey with the Sweet Briar girls. He doesn’t recall having any crushes on the students but says he liked them very much.

He went to Amherst Presbyterian Church with the students, and they took him to Lynchburg when Ringling Brothers’ circus came to town. His mother chaperoned them at dances at the University of Virginia, Virginia Military Institute and Hampden-Sydney, and they would visit the house on Faculty Row.

“Mostly, we’d hang around the gymnasium or the hockey field or the baseball field and play sports with them,” Edwards said.

The youngest Edwards boys are mentioned on page 179 of “The Story of Sweet Briar College,” by Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman. They were known on campus for their hockey skills and played with a non-student team called The Campus Characters. Of them, Stohlman writes, “… the Edwards boys, the physics professor’s young sons, barefoot among the clashing sticks, always emerged unscathed — usually with the ball.”

Edwards and Griffith sold root beers to men building Williams Gymnasium and Mary Helen Cochran Library, and newspapers and magazines to faculty and staff. They also learned how to milk cows at the school’s dairy farm. Edwards said his dad, disdainful of the dairy’s Holsteins because their milk had a lower percentage of butter fat, kept a Jersey cow behind their house for a while.

At Halloween, “when trick-or-treating had never been heard of,” Edwards said he and Griffith went to a costume party on Faculty Row, where they “bobbed for apples from the Sweet Briar orchard and drank cider from the orchard.”

The brothers went on a late-night coon hunt on Paul Mountain with a man who worked at the dairy farm and spent lazy summer days at the lake, fishing, boating and sometimes camping on its banks. Edwards said Sweet Briar’s director of grounds once scolded him for playing hopscotch “from one boat seat to the other as we launched a rowboat from the dock.”

He also remembers diving to the bottom of Sweet Briar Lake for a handful of mud to see what kinds of things lived inside, “meanwhile oblivious to the fact that we were muddying up the water for the other swimmers.”

Their route to the lake took the brothers past the Boxwood Inn, today’s Alumnae House. “They had a soda fountain and I knew the lady who ran the place, and they would give me free ice cream sometimes if I looked real hungry,” Edwards said.

Shortly after the Edwards family moved to Sweet Briar, eldest brother Howard went to Darlington to attend high school in his dad’s hometown. He lived with an aunt, and when old enough, each of his brothers followed.

Edwards, who towers over most people at 6 feet 6 inches tall, was small for his age in high school, having skipped third grade back in Amherst. Despite being a foot shorter than he is today, Edwards said he was a good basketball player in high school, better in fact than after he had a growth spurt in college.

He said he would have liked to have played varsity ball in college but with his labs and classes didn’t have time to practice.

The Bird Man and the Wildflower Girl

Edwards thinks he first became interested in birds when he made a blue bird box as a kindergartener living in South Carolina. Several years later, when he returned to the Palmetto State for high school, his passion was cemented.

“We lived near a cypress swamp and I went down there and saw a hooded warbler and ruby-crowned kinglet and then that really hooked me hard,” he said.

Around the same time, he was also thinking about college. He wanted to go to Cornell University, which is well-known for its ornithology program, but couldn’t afford it. In the end, he went to the University of Virginia, where he earned a biology degree in 1940.

In 1941, Edwards finally got the chance to go to Cornell. Over the next eight years, he earned a master’s in ornithology and vertebrate zoology and doctorate in ornithology, zoology and botany, dividing his studies with a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II and the Korean War. After his military service and time at Cornell, he worked as a civilian with the Army’s Chemical Corps in Frederick, Md. There, in 1954, he met his wife, Mabel Thacher.

Mabel, a naturalized Canadian, also worked for the corps, and she was head of a branch of the Maryland Ornithological Society. She also liked wildflowers, particularly terrestrial orchids such as lady slippers, Edwards said, an interest she developed as a child on family trips to the mountains and lowlands of Kentucky.

“I guess we first met just walking around the Army base,” Edwards said. “I think she’d probably heard that I was interested in birds, so I gave a talk [to the Ornithological Society].”

Edwards soon found out that they had more in common than birds. Years before, while stationed with the Army in Louisville, he had met Mabel’s parents. He thinks they had “probably recommended” him, but regardless, Edwards said he thought she was cute and the feeling was mutual. They were married a year and a half later.

After they married, Edwards said they “were vagabonding” for a while. He had a summer job in Wisconsin, which was followed by two or three weeks studying birds in Mexico. He taught for friend at Hanover College who was on sabbatical and then for three years served as associate director of the Houston Museum of Natural History. During this time, he also did Audubon lectures about birds.

In 1965, after teaching for five years at the University of the Pacific in California, he and Mabel came to Sweet Briar, where he taught biology until he retired. That first summer, they lived on campus at Patteson House and then they rented an apartment on Kenmore Road in Amherst. For 20 years, they lived in Sanctuary Cottage, where Carrie and John Gregory Brown live today, before building a house on Woodland Road.

The couple, who enjoyed hiking the College’s acreage in search of birds and wildflowers, is responsible for compiling several lists of flora and fauna found on campus. Edwards credits his wife with finding and listing — complete with family, genus, species and other identifiers — more than 600 plants found on Sweet Briar property.

She also kept a journal detailing dozens of outings she took hunting wildflowers at Sweet Briar and on the Blue Ridge Parkway and Appalachian Trail.

Mabel died in 1996, and there is a wildflower garden on Farmhouse Road in her memory.

Edwards’ records also include a typed list of nearly 150 birds, along with pen and pencil notations about when they were seen or heard. The list, dated 1965, includes everything from mockingbirds and crows to less common birds, such as the eastern wood pewee, orange-crowned warbler, Lincoln’s sparrow and American redstart.

In addition to surveying Sweet Briar’s forests and sanctuaries, Edwards and his wife traveled the world together, studying the birds, wildflowers and culture of Africa, England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Central America and many U.S. states.

During this time, Edwards wrote several books and field guides including, “Finding Birds in Mexico,” “Finding Birds in Panama,” “A Field Guide to the Birds of Mexico” and “A Coded List of Birds of the World,” which has been called the “first complete one-volume list of the species of birds of the world to be published anywhere.”

Edwards also made films about his travels. He produced and narrated “Travels in Guatemala and Mexico: Ornithology, Archaeology, Anthropology,” and numerous other films shot overseas and at U.S. national parks. “I always say, around the world in eighty years,” he said, borrowing from Jules Verne. “But I haven’t been all the way around the world.”

During his travels, Edwards also spotted some very rare birds. “I saw two whooping cranes spending the winter in Aransas Wildlife Refuge in Texas when there were only thirteen in the entire world, including zoos,” he said. “I saw two trumpeter swans on a swampy lake in the Grand Tetons … when there were only a few dozen known to exist in the world.

“I saw a pair of Kirtland’s warblers and their nestlings in central Michigan when there were about 100 individuals of that species left in the world. All three species have grown considerably in numbers since those days and may eventually be considered out of danger.”

When asked about his favorite birds, however, he said his favorites in the United States are the wood thrush and indigo bunting, but abroad he prefers the quetzal. “It’s kind of iridescent green, about the size of a pigeon and mostly iridescent,” he said of the Costa Rican bird.

“[They’re] green on the back and bright red on the belly and the under parts, and a white tail, and then a long streamer of features going about two feet beyond the end of the tail that’s iridescent green. The Aztecs used them in their ceremonies and costumes.”

His “bucket list” — and he used that phrase exactly — includes one rare bird that he still hasn’t seen in its natural habitat: the hyacinth macaw. Seeing the rare bird would require a trip to the Pantanal, a swampy, marshy area of southern Brazil. “This one is all hyacinth color, kind of blue,” he said. “I’d like to see that one in the wild.”

Resurrection men, she learned, were thieves who dug up corpses and sold them to doctors for medical research. An image came into her mind — grave robbers exhuming bodies under the cloak of near-darkness — and the first scene of the book was born.

“It was a moonlit night, and a small boy was holding the reins of a horse and wagon outside a graveyard,” Tinti said, describing the picture that was forming in her imagination. “I didn’t know anything about the boy, only that he was waiting for the resurrection men to bring the bodies, and that he was terrified.”

That scene became the first chapter Tinti wrote of “The Good Thief,” her first novel. She will read from the book at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5 in Sweet Briar’s Pannell Gallery. The event is part of the College’s 2009-2010 Writers Series, and admission is free.

As she continued writing that first scene, Tinti described the 11-year-old orphan. His name was Ren, and in his right hand, he held the horse’s reins. When she questioned what the boy was doing with his left hand, she was stumped until the answer hit her like a gravedigger’s shovel. Ren, she concluded, was missing his left hand.

“Suddenly the boy was alive,” she said. “This is how I discovered Ren’s secret, and I used it to unlock his character. It answered so many questions about him — why he was alone and how he might have fallen in with these dangerous men. Once I had this detail, the book came to me like a vision. I could see the whole thing. The details of the plot took much longer to figure out, though. Years.”

“The Good Thief,” which has been compared to works by Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, is replete with fascinating and sometimes quirky characters. Among them are Benjamin Nab, who adopts Ren from a Catholic orphanage under false pretenses; landlady Mrs. Sands, who shouts in all-capital letters; and Dolly, a giant hit man who is befriended by Ren.

Sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Sands and Dolly, characters just materialized. Dolly, for instance, appeared after Tinti, in a fit of boredom, thought, “What’s the weirdest thing that could happen right now?”

“Others, like Benjamin, I had to really work on,” she said. “My writing technique is sort of like using a divining rod. I try and bring my intuition into it as much as possible. Sometimes that works splendidly. Other times it takes me on false roads for awhile.”

In addition to “The Good Thief,” Tinti is author of the short story collection “Animal Crackers,” and she is co-founder of One Story magazine. Currently, she is 100 pages into her next novel and waiting to see if “The Good Thief” catches the attention of film directors.

If it does, Tinti could offer some advice to the casting director. “For Ren, it would have to be some unknown kid,” she said, “although I loved Dillon Freasier, who played Daniel Day-Lewis’ son in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ For Benjamin, I always imagined someone like Johnny Depp. [For] Dolly, I’d say Brendan Gleeson or James Gandolfini.”

The next event in the Writers Series will feature D.A. Powell, poet and author of “Tea,” “Lunch,” “Cocktails” and “Chronic.” The reading will begin at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 25 in the Boxwood Room of the Florence Elston Inn & Conference Center.

For more information, contact John Gregory Brown, director of Sweet Briar’s creative writing program at brown@sbc.edu or Ext. 6434.