Tom Parsons is a retired professor of zoology at the University of Toronto and lives year-round on Seagrove Avenue near the Cape May Point State Park. He’s a fixture and co-leader at the almost-daily CMBO trips at the Point, the Beanery, the South Cape May Meadows, and on New Jersey Audubon spring and fall weekends. Look at a group of birders just about anywhere at any season in Cape May, and Tom is probably one of the members, helping members to find birds, giving advice, and generally being helpful.
Photo by Pat Sutton
When I spoke with him in late November 2007, Tom was recuperating from a broken hip, which had befallen him on the last day of the Fall Weekend/ THE Bird Show.
RR: You’re not originally from Cape May?
TP: Oh no…I was born in New York City and was brought up in the suburbs both in Bergen County in New Jersey and across the river in Westchester County, New York.
RR: Did you go to school there?
TP: No. I went to schools in the Boston area, first at boarding school at Andover, and then I attended Harvard for undergraduate and graduate work, where I studied zoology. (E.O Wilson was a fellow graduate student) And there was a three-year period when I was an instructor at Harvard.
RR: What a school to go to for zoology! The names!
TP: Actually, my freshman advisor there was Ludlow Griscom (one of the great early birders.)
RR: Really! I’ve read he was quite a personality, hard to get along with.
TP: But I think I saw him only four times, and I don’t really have any stories.
RR: How did you end up in Canada?
TP: They were hiring like crazy there in the 1960s, and Ontario universities were hiring more PhDs than the entire country’s colleges turned out, for something like twelve years in a row. Needless to say I had lots of American and British colleagues. I was at the University of Toronto for thirty-two years, from 1960 to 1992, teaching zoology and comparative anatomy…I enjoyed teaching, but I ended up doing administrative work, which I did not enjoy.
RR: So did you travel overseas at all with your job?
TP: No, I generally stuck to North America; I didn’t do much traveling.
RR: Had you always been a bird watcher, a birder?
TP: Yes, but I certainly can’t remember when I first started.
RR: Were you always interested in birds? Professionally, did you work with birds?
TP: I worked mainly with reptiles and co-authored a general text about vertebrae anatomy. When I was at American Society of Zoologists annual meetings, if it was in or near an interesting place, I’d take a few days off and go birding.
I had a colleague who I helped teach a field ornithology course, and we did have trips to Churchill, Manitoba, for five years, from about the time the Ross’s Gulls turned up there…in the late 1970s. Churchill has this weirdly late spring. The tree line is pretty far south compared to areas west and east of there, where treeline goes up practically to the Arctic Ocean. Hudson Bay is shallow and freezes solid in the winter, and in spring with the wind blowing across it, it’s very cold. You’ve got tundra to the south and boreal forest to the north.
We had to give it up because it was too expensive for the students…because most all Canadian students have to have a job in summer and they couldn’t afford the time off in summer or even late spring.
Later we gave the class closer to home, in New Brunswick, and then another time on Sapelo Island in Georgia.
RR: When did you first come to Cape May?
TP: I don’t remember the first time I came here, but I took some time around Christmas vacations a few times early on, and the first time I came in the fall was during Pete Dunne’s second year at the hawkwatch, the second year of the official count, sometime in the mid-1970s.
RR: Was that you I saw walking all over the place on fall weekends, in the 70s and 80s, both below the Canal and as far up as Stone Harbor and Nummy Island?
TP: Yes…I never drove, and I don’t now, though it would be very convenient now since my wife Peg died a year ago, and she did drive. I think at my age it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to learn because driving would never be automatic; I’d think about what I’d have to do in situations, and by that time it would be too late…And I didn’t always walk to more distant places—I’d get rides or catch a bus.
RR: There’s really a bus line here, in Cape May?
TP: Oh yes, with elaborate schedules.
RR: So you retired and came down here in 1992, and you live at the Point?
TP: Really I’m in Lower Township; it’s a weird set-up…Cape May City, West Cape May…the Point…the township wanders in between. Cape May Point never touches Cape May or West Cape May, Lower Township meanders through it…You know where Karl and Judy Lukens live? I’m a few doors down from them on Seagrove Avenue. Incidentally, David Sibley lived between the two of us when he was writing his field guide.
Photo by Karl Lukens
TP: I wanted to retire to somewhere where the birding was very good, and my wife wanted to retire to somewhere warmer than Toronto—which isn’t really that cold—and we both wanted to be near the ocean…cost wasn’t too much of a problem…and we’d sold the house in Toronto for a good price…and my pension is in Canadian dollars which was higher than the US one then.
RR: I edit CMBO’s trip schedules, and I always see you listed as a trip leader around the area. You must lead a trip every day.
TP: I sometimes go on several trips a day, but not necessarily as a leader. I live right where many of the trips start, and I walk a lot.
RR: Are there any Cape May stories you can tell me?
TP: Well, I was there for some of that spectacular flight of robins during the past decade.
TP: Perhaps even more impressive was the day of the Great Blue Heron flight, in 1994.
RR: Which I missed somehow.
TP: It was the first day of a Fall Weekend, back when the weekend was late September, early October. Over 3500 Great Blue Herons flew over. On that day was one of the few times I’ve actually seen Pete Dunne speechless. I was standing in the Cape May Point State Park parking lot, and Pete drove up and stuck his head out of the car and told me he’d seen several dozen Great Blue Herons, and then I pointed up, and he looked up and stared—and didn’t say anything for a while…Hundreds and hundreds were going over.
RR: Do you have a particular bird that exemplifies Cape May for you?
TP: Not a specific bird, but I was here for the Brown-crested Martin in 1997 and the Whiskered Terns in 1993 and 1998. That was the first Whiskered Tern in the New World, and the martin was the second record in North America—pretty good birds…
I have a yard list that includes the sight of a young gannet walking down the road in front of my house, just sitting in the street. I called Michael O’Brien, who got a box and heaved a blanket over the bird and took it down to the Concrete Ship and released it…dumped it on the beach. It walked and wandered around a bit until it hit water and eventually realized it could swim, and off madly it went.
RR: Do you have a favorite birding spot in Cape May?
TP: Cape May Point is such a great place, no matter what the weather or what time of the year. You’ve got lots of habitats—the ocean, ocean watching, the woods, the marsh, the ponds, houses and gardens around Cape May Point.
And the Point is a lovely area for birding in bad weather. If you’ve got a bad northeast wind, you can go over and bird under a porch at the Concrete Ship at the end of Sunset Boulevard…Once when a hurricane came through…Sooty Terns and Bridled Terns were sitting on the beach there.
And it’s a safety valve with a group trip…Pete Dunne is a great birder but he’s also extraordinarily lucky. One time on a field trip to the Meadows there was a northeaster blowing, howling wind and drenching rain…We went to the Concrete Ship and Pete set up a scope for the group, and found three terns in the same field of view sitting right next to each other…Roseate, Common, and Forster’s.
TP: I might disagree a little with the dictum about there’s never a bad day birding in Cape May—you do get bad days—but a bad day here is much better than bad days in other places.