Buck Edwards and alumnae take an early morning bird walk during the 1977 reunion weekend.

Buck Edwards: Sweet Briar’s Bird Man

SUZANNE RAMSEY
College relations staff writer

Buck (left) and Griffith at Sweet Briar Lake.


Edwards looking every bit the adventurer.


Edwards and his wife in 1970.


Edwards bird watches with students in 1972.


Edwards at his 90th birthday party.

In the sepia-tone photo, two grinning, barefoot boys sit in a rowboat, side by side. They’re wearing knickers and short-sleeved, collared shirts, and their feet appear blackened, perhaps from running around shoeless on a warm summer day.

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.”