Mcgill professor understood birdsong
Could tell which ones were related
Way back in 1972, four professors at Mcgill University perused the curriculum vitae of a cocky, outspoken young undergraduate student from the University of Guelph and agreed to accept him as one of the first two M.SC. students to work on birds of prey at the newly formed Macdonald Raptor Research Centre. That student went on to complete his M.SC. thesis in 1976 followed by his PHD in 1978 and eventually rose to the lofty heights of full professor at Mcgill University as well as the director of what later became known as the Avian Science and Conservation Centre situated on Mcgill’s Macdonald campus. But enough about me.
One of those four professors was Robert Lemon, an ornithologist at Mcgill’s downtown campus. Somewhat surprisingly to me, he had been persuaded by a British falconer to open a peregrine falcon breeding centre on the Macdonald campus affiliated with the Departments of Renewable Resources and Animal Science. The other three professors were Roger Bider, Roger Buckland and Paul Lague. Peregrines were in a serious state of decline because of reproductive failure caused by the regrettable use of organochlorine insecticides such as DDT, and one of the solutions was to breed them in captivity and release the young into the wild. Because of their expertise with artificial insemination of poultry, Buckland and Lague, the two animal scientists on the Macdonald campus, were a natural tie-in to falcon breeding. More on Bider later.
Bob Lemon was a bit of an odd duck in the group; his main research interest was not really bird conservation at all, but rather their singing abilities! Not only could he discern the difference among hundreds of bird calls and songs, he could also ascribe meaning to them.
Bob particularly favoured studying the northern cardinal, mostly because both sexes sang.
Back in the 1970s, few people were interested in offering seed to songbirds, let alone voting the cardinal as the most popular backyard bird as was revealed in numerous polls over the ensuing decades.
Bob’s hearing was so acute that he could differentiate between the dialects of cardinals living in Quebec and Ontario and he could even listen to the songs of dozens of cardinals in a New Brunswick forest and discern whether one was the offspring of an-other. When not teach in gornithology and other courses or tramping in the fields and forests catching and leg-banding songbirds and recording their vocalizations, he spent his time with his graduate students and research assistants in his laboratory in the biology department, where they examined computerized printoutsof birdsongsknown as sonograms. Perhaps one of his most significant contributions to ornithology was the discovery that not all bird songs are issued in random fashion, but instead are related to the one immediately preceding it. Overall, Bob’s groundbreaking research, published in more than a hundred scientific papers and featured in numerous conference presentations, demonstrated that bird brains were a lot more sophisticated than humans ever gave them credit for and, moreover, still provides today a basis for understanding behaviour at a neurological level.
Basically, Robert Lemon was a quintessential scientist whose role in the centre, of which I became director in 1974, was to make sure that we pursued good science during our efforts to save the peregrine falcon. I’d like to think that we exceeded his expectations. To his credit, he assisted me in the supervision of my very first graduate student, Brenda Penak, who studied red-shouldered hawks in the wild.
Bob passed away on March 23, at age 79 after retiring from McGill in 1999 to live in Peterborough, Ont. Upon reading the comprehensive obituary written by Susan Ferrier Mackay in The Globe and Mail on June 27, I realized that there were many facets to Bob’s life that I never knew about.
To my chagrin, I realized that I had never really taken the time to sit down with him and learn about how he got involved in bird research in the first place, his penchant for writing and performing in Christmas skits in his department, or his fondness for jazz and classical music. While I did speak with him once or twice after he left McGill, I realize that I was so busy with my own life and career that I had let slip by any real opportunity to get to know better this interesting and accomplished man. All I can do now is to thank him for everything that he did for me in my career and hope that somewhere, somehow he reads these words.
Meanwhile, one of those other four professors, Roger Bider, to whom I also owe a great deal of gratitude for believing in me and giving me my start in my professional career, was recently honoured by the Ecomuseum, a unique zoo beside McGill’s Morgan Arboretum in Ste. Anne de Bellevue. On July 5, I attended the official opening of the Roger Bider Aviary, a modern and distinctly constructed enclosure of 1,325 square metres and 10 metres in height. Allowing visitors to sit right inside with the birds, this world-class aviary provides a comfortable home to a flock of unreleasable water birds comprising over a dozen species, including colourful wood ducks, snow geese, and black-crowned night-herons. The $665,000 to construct the facility was awarded mostly from Canadian Heritage and the ministry of tourism of Quebec, but rounded off with numerous donations from private donors.
It is highly fitting that this amazing aviary be named after Roger Bider. After all, he was the founder of the St. Lawrence Valley Natural History Society and of the Ecomuseum itself.
Now attracting more than 100,000 visitors annually, the Ecomuseum is open 7 days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Billed as the only outdoor zoo on the island of Montreal, the facility is home to more than 115 species of wildlife, including wolves, bears, otters, birds of prey, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Visit www.zooenville.ca or call 514-457-9449 for more information.