Abstract
Art Risser's death following a stroke on the day after Christmas 2008, was entirely unexpected. But many of his saddened friends were also startled to learn he was 70. I think most of us thought he was far younger. When I first met him, shortly after his arrival at the San Diego Zoo, as Assistant Curator of Birds, in 1974, I thought he was in his late twenties. He was, in fact, 35 when he thus entered the zoo profession, having previously been involved in mammalogy.
He earned his Master's in Wildlife Management from the University of Arizona, in 1963, conducting field research on White-nosed Coatis. Prior to earning his Ph.D. from UC Davis in 1970, he collected mammals in Namibia for the Smithsonian Institution and studied the hosts for scrub typhus in Pakistan, for the University of Maryland's School of Medicine.
Even though my perceptions at our first meeting were somewhat distorted, as I was 14 years old, Art's trademark game-showhost-good-looks, with his perfectly styled head of carroty hair and famous "1,000-Watt grin," coupled with a boyish enthusiasm and sometimes startling sense of humor, certainly conveyed youthfulness. This was appropriate for a man who was in the forefront among a generation of bird curators who completely reshaped American zoo aviculture in the '70s and '80s.
When I was 14, I was obsessed with the San Diego Zoo the way other kids were with sports teams or rock bands. The year before, I got to make four separate visits from Berkeley, and the second of my 1974 visits lasted several days, thanks to family friends. I impatiently anticipated the arrival of each month's ZooNooz, the Zoological Society of San Diego's magazine, and spent any time I could reading back issues in the library of the San Francisco Zoo and the California Academy of Sciences.
So, when on the last of my several day's visit, I recognized Ron Gordan Garrison, the long-time photographer of the Zoological Society, I was delighted. Ron was standing in front of the great community aviary for birds of prey. I, of course, wanted to know what his next ZooNooz project would be. He was photographing all the zoo's vultures. It quickly developed that the article these pictures would illustrate would be written by the man holding up a reflector made from foil-wrapped cardboard, San Diego's brand new Assistant Curator of Birds. For the next hour at least, I asked questions. Thirty years later, I found Art found this experience somewhat alarming. But that conversation left me far wiser, if sadder.
Up to that day, there were things that puzzled and concerned me, abut for which I had no explanation. During 1965, the number of bird tax a at the San Diego Zoo went over a thousand. And it stayed that way through the rest of the 1960's. On Dec. 31, 1969, it reached an all-time high of 1,126 species and subspecies of birds (and 3,465 specimens). Then it dropped. At the end of 1970 there were 1,097 taxa. On Jan. 1, 1972, there were 917. A year later there were 856. And onJanl., 1974, the number stood at 772. I found this deeply disturbing.
At the same time, my own small avicultural world had also become much smaller. In 1972, I was, with much effort, able to convince my parents to buy me Red-eared Waxbills at Woolworth's and Strawberry Finches and Cut-throats at the White Front, all for $3.95 a pair. In 1974, I found the prices for all of these were now $40 a pair.
In answer to the question that all young zoo enthusiasts ask:
"Why don't you get some (fill in the blank)?" Art told me all about the Newcastle's ~arantine imposed in 1973, a subject of which till that point I had been blissfully unaware. Being thus enlightened was a pivotal point in my development toward becoming an aviculturist and an avicultural historian. In one conversation, my entire perception of birds in American aviculture in general, and U.S. zoos in particular had shifted, and from that point everything took on a different context.
Art's evangelical zeal in facing the Newcastle's crisis was a reflection of his newly attained responsibilities as Assistant Curator of Birds to the largest collection in the Western Hemisphere (and until a very short time before, the world). His first several years at the zoo were made difficult by one quarantine station crisis after another.
He enumerated several of these in a paper presented at a regional conference of what was then the AAZPA, in 1976 (Risser, 1976): Ten South African Penguins, for whose quarantine the zoo paid $1,000, were destroyed, along with all the other birds in a commercial station, when a Turaco tested positive for Newcastle's on their 29th day there. A compatible pair of Double-wattled Cassowaries had to be sent back to Holland (where they were sold elsewhere) when a starling at the same station died 20 days after their arrival. Attempts to pair up San Diego's Great Hornbill and White-tailed Black Cockatoo were thwarted over happenstance of one kind and another. The particularly nightmarish logistics involved in bringing a shipment of Birds of Paradise and other birds from Papua New Guinea in 1977, were the subject of another painfully detailed article by Art (Risser, 1977)...