Remembering Dr. Arthur Crane Risser, Part II

Abstract

Editor's note: The tables referred to throughout the following article can be found in the previous edition of Watchbird, 36-4, on pages 8-12. This article will be folllowed by Part 111 in our next edition.

Art Crane's evangelical zeal in confronting 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 dif ficult 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, 1976a): 10 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 T uraco 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 (Risser, 1977). As a remedy to these situations, Art pursued the establishment of a quarantine station expressly for zoos, to be jointly administered by the Zoological Society of San Diego and Sea World, Inc. (Risser, 1976a). As it happened, this did not come to pass, and, by the 1980s, the problems inherent in importing birds through commercial and government quarantine stations were dealt with in various ways and bringing birds to U.S. zoos became somewhat routine, if far more costly than before.

Enhanced propagation and the establishment of self-sustaining captive populations in the U.S. were zealously pursued. The San Diego Zoo had a very long tradition in breeding birds. Founded in 1916 and established at its present site in 1922, the zoo had already achieved a remarkable breeding record by the end of the 1920s. Fourteen taxa of psttacines were bred there through 1930 (Dolan & Moran, 1970), far and away the best record for an American zoo (Lindholm, 1999). These included the Red-sided Eclectus, the Bluewinged Grass Parakeet and the Swainson's Lorikeet (the first lory breeding in North America). In 1930 alone, 16 species of wild pigeons and doves were hatched at San Diego, along with Guadalupe Island House Finches, Diamond Sparrows and Yellow-billed Cardinals (Ring, 1931).

Kenton C. Lint joined the staff of the San Diego Zoo as a mammal keeper in 1936, joined the bird department in 1938, and, after service in Pacific, became Curator of Birds in 1948, retiring in 1976 when Art succeeded him. K.C. would have been a hard act for anyone to follow. From 1938 through 1976, more than 425 species and subspecies of birds hatched at San Diego (Lindholm, 1993a&b). The huge number of publications he authored further established San Diego's reputation as a center of aviculture (Lindholm, 1993b). And of course, the sheer size of the collection compelled attention.

Although an enormous number of birds were hatched during K.C.'s tenure and distributed to public and private collections all over the country, results were not always consistent. For example, I present San Diego Zoo's breeding records for 1959 (Table 1.), when the year's-end inventory listed 2,109 birds of 559 taxa, compared and contrasted with those for 1970 (Table 11.), which began with 3,465 specimens of 1,126 species and subspecies ofbirds. There is almost an inverse relation of taxa bred to the number exhibited.

On closer examination it can be seen that quite aside from the number of taxa, the sorts of birds propagated at each end of that eleven year interval are quite different. In 1959, the most well represented order were the Galliformes (gamebirds) with 22 taxa. Only three were bred in 1970. Eleven kinds of finches were bred in 1959 and none at all in 1970. On the other hand, no sofibills were bred in 1959 and seven species were hatched in 1970. While parrots are well represented in both years, the nineteen taxa bred in 1959 made up less than a third of the total, while the 28 hatched in 1970 comprised more than two thirds of the taxa bred that year.

This was very much K.C.'s intention. In an interview (Lint, et al, 1990) he explained:

"My philosophy is that the more species you have, the more you have to work with. Each year I tried to concentrate on a different family of birds, you see. Because I had a large collection, I could do this and I was able to establish a lot of breeding records with that collection."

The imposition of N ewcastle' s Disease import restrictions ended this state of things. In 1974, the year Art arrived at San Diego, the year began with an inventory of 2,510 birds of 772 taxa. As can be seen from Table III, the total number of species bred jumped back to 1959 levels, exceeding that year's total by one. Though parrots still dominated with the 36 taxa comprising nearly half the...

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