BirdCapeMay.org

For the past twenty-five years, Tom Gilmore has been the president of the New Jersey Audubon Society.  During that time that he has seen the society grow from less than 4,000 members to 24,000, from four struggling sanctuaries to ten staffed centers, and into an effective conservation organization with an international reputation.  A recipient of numerous conservation awards, Tom has also served on the board of New Jersey Natural Lands Trust, the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, the Philadelphia Zoological Society, and the American Birding Association.  He lives with his wife Joanne in Franklin Lakes.  Tom is the author of Tuna on the Fly (2006), and False Albacore: A Comprehensive Guide to Fly Fishing’s Hottest Fish (2002).

RR:  You’re from the Philadelphia area. Where did the interest in the outdoors come from?
TG:  I grew up in Mount Airy in Philadelphia.  My grandmother and her husband worked on a farm in Chestnut Hill, and as a youngster, on weekends and holidays—and every day in the summer—I’d ride my bike the two miles over to my grandmother’s house, and play on the farm, eat fresh vegetables and eggs and things like that…The farmer’s son was about two years older than I was, and a real outdoor person, and we’d hike down to the Wissahickon Valley and Fairmount Park, go fishing, and camp by day in an old grown-over sand trap on an abandoned golf course. 

Fairmount Park goes from Chestnut Hill, and parallels the Wissahickon on both sides until it joins the Schuylkill, and then on down on into Philadelphia.  You have about eight miles of waterfront park, and in the Chestnut Hill and Roxboro sections, both ridgetops were preserved.

RR:  So the area really had an influence on you early on…
TG:  You can probably trace everything in my life to Fairmont Park, which was a few miles from where I lived in Mt. Airy, which didn’t have any parkland.  I caught my first fish there on Wissahickon Creek, and now my passion is flyfishing and I’ve written three books about it.  I learned to play soccer and scored my first soccer goal in Fairmont Park, and I got a college scholarship to play soccer; I played for Temple.  I actually took my wife Joanne to Fairmount Park the night I asked her to marry me.  Everything sort of dates back to Fairmount Park…

Someone had asked me recently what drives me to work for open space preservation funding—I’ve taken the position that we need the urban parks for good healthy cities, and you look at areas that are coming back and they have an urban park in them.

RR:  What was your first job?
TG:  I taught high school at the Archbishop Carroll School in Radnor on the Main Line for five years, to the day.  Then I worked at the Schuylkill Environmental Center from 1973 to 1978, which is right at the edge of Fairmont Park, for five years.  And my next job was at the Philadelphia Zoo at Fairmont Park, for five years, from 1978 to 1983.

In each of my first three jobs I stayed five years…I told them all that I’d be there five years, and I gave each a year’s notice—to the day—when I’d be leaving.

RR: What did you study at Temple University?
TG:  I got a degree in accounting and I also did graduate work in finance.

RR:  So you were definitely a manager type—how did you end up in environmental work?
TG:  I got involved with conservation while I was working one summer vacation for a CPA firm, and we audited Schuylkill Valley Nature Center, where I had worked in earlier summers…and I’m sitting there doing the books, wishing I were outside cutting trails or hiking and doing nature stuff…and I asked Dick James—the founding executive director there—what I had to do get into the conservation field.  He told me to get a masters degree, and to expect to make about a third of what I’d make in the private field, and to wait in line with about 200 other people until a job popped up…so I thought, hmm…not a good career move.  But I later applied for the for the assistant director job at Schulykill when I was teaching in Radnor. 

RR:  Did you teach at the nature center, or do programming?
TG:  I didn’t do much of either.  I did some stream ecology studies and programs, and there was summer institute on water quality issues.  I knew aquatic insects—I knew the Latin names of a dozen mayflies from fly-fishing, which was useful.

RR:  So fishing did give you a good background in some biology and environmental things, just not in birds or botany or butterflies.
TG:  And Dick James was not a particularly good birder himself; he was a good general naturalist.  We’d go on Christmas Bird Counts and we had the darndest time with sparrows and other small birds.

I developed a passion for saving land, but just not necessarily identifying everything on it.  I don’t go out enough to pretend I know birds well.  I’ll study the bird tapes for World Series of Birding and the Spring Weekend, and I’ll just start getting into the groove and bang!—It’s the end of June and I’m done.

RR:  Becoming an accomplished birder or naturalist takes a commitment to not doing anything else for a long while…
TG:  And I don’t get much satisfaction for doing something halfway…I don’t have time enough to flyfish, which I am very good at—that’s my passion, I write about it, I obsess about it.

RR:  Let’s talk about fish for awhile; I think I know enough about fish and fishing to get by.  As a boy you first caught trout in the Wissahickon River?
TG:  I caught sunnies in the Wissahickon.  The first fish I caught, a little sunfish, I took home in a brown paper bag on the bus and a trolley, and I put it in an aquarium and it lived for about three months.  When I caught my first trout, I was just about beside myself that I’d actually caught one.

RR:  When did you first get interested in fly-fishing?
TG:  I had whooping cough in fourth grade and missed a semester—my teacher was wonderful and sent home lots of projects—and I got to reading about fly fishing and my parents got me subscriptions to Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, and Sports Afield.  I’d be reading about Yellowstone and all these other great places…it just opened up these horizons—I wanted to travel the world and fish.

At the time, I got a fifty cents allowance on Saturday.  Near the playground was a sweet shop where you could get a Coke for a dime and an ice cream sundae for a quarter. I’d go next door to the hardware store and buy one hand-tied Pocono fly every week.  So I had this big collection of flies, but I didn’t have a fly-rod.  Then I read about this stocked trout lake—a hatchery essentially—and my parents took me; I was in heaven.  After I had caught more fish than I was supposed to and my parents had spent more than they wanted to, I saw two gentlemen fishing with fly rods in another pond as we were leaving, and they could catch all the trout they wanted to because they were using barbless hooks and could release the fish.

I told myself I had to learn this, but I later realized that there was a lot about flyfishing…knots, streams, a whole hatching schedule of insects…a lot to learn…all in pursuit of an animal with a brain the size of a pea.

RR:  I know fly-fishermen who are wonderful entomologists and naturalists.
TG:  You can even learn what insect is going to hatch in a particular stream on a particular afternoon…To see a stream that you thought devoid of life and suddenly there’s a hundred trout rising there, going after a particular insect…If you’ve figured out what insect or what form of insect they are going after you can catch every trout in that pool, but if you don’t know anything, you won’t catch anything.

RR:  Who taught you to fly-fish?
TG:  I taught myself mostly, and then one summer I learned fly-tying from a friend; then I joined a fly-tying club, and after that a fly-fishing club.

I could fish from daybreak till dark…Joanne later surprised me with a trip to Yellowstone, and I fished in every stream there for about five years in a row…they don’t stock trout most places there, and trout are in every stream. 

Coming back East it wasn’t the same thing…I later had practically gotten bored by trout, I was catching so many—mostly in the Catskills on the Beaver Kill, Esopus Creek, and the Schoharie.

So I got involved in saltwater fly-fishing.

RR:  Why saltwater?
TG:  I started to look for something more challenging, and one of the guys I’d met in the club twenty-five years ago, Ed Jaworski, had become one of the best casters in the world; he’s famous in that world.  Ed was a former professor of Latin and Greek at Villanova, had written a lot of books about ocean fishing, and he encouraged me.

The reason I started with false albacore is that it’s an ideal fly fish.  They’re leader shy, and faster—they can swim 40 to 50 miles per hour—and stronger than anything inshore…These guys are not like bluefish, which will eat everything and anything; they’re very selective. It’s a fish—a species of tuna—that every trout fisherman would like to catch…Some trout guys will only fish for false albacore…

RR:  I was reading that tuna have the ability to thermoregulate, which partially explains why they can swim so fast, but which contravenes what I’ve learned about cold-blooded fish, which supposedly can’t do that.  Can you fish for false albacore in New Jersey?
TG:  Yes…but they’re the only species of tuna that doesn’t taste very good, which is why false albacore have become a dominant fish, and explains the health of their population.  They’re a highly migratory fish, and they had never been studied because they have no commercial value.

…and talk about range changes because of global warming!  False albacore were never this far north in the past; they’re a southern fish, like the bonita, but the bonita was the common species here; now the false albacore is, and it’s caught as far up as the southern part of Cape Cod, and off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

TG:  I tracked false albacore landings on Websites from Texas to Maine, and I wrote a book about the fish because there are so many misconceptions in the literature and the popular press.  It’s the only book about the species, and knew I wouldn’t make any money, but I wanted to get it out there and let an unknown species of fish tell its story.

RR:  Tell me about some of the places around the world where you’ve gone fishing.  I know you’ve gone to Costa Rica.
TG:  I actually first went to Costa Rica on a New Jersey Audubon birding trip, and the local guide was Carlos “Charlie” Gomez.   I was impressed by how much the Costa Ricans appreciated the natural heritage that they had, which is not so in many places.

RR:  Have you ever caught Atlantic salmon?  It’s sort of a totemic fish for me; I’ve seen salmon runs in the North Atlantic, and think about what it must have been like in New England 400 years ago.
TG:  I’ve never fished for Atlantic salmon, but one of the places I always wanted to go fishing in was Alaska for Pacific salmon.  I was given the gift of a fishing trip to Alaska at the 2003 Cape May Autumn Weekend.  Everyone—my wife, the board, all the N.J. Audubon staff, everyone—knew about it but me, and I was totally blown away.  A very emotional moment!

The next spring I flew into the town of King Salmon in southern Alaska.  The trip was timed so that it coincided with the salmon migration—and I got king, sockeye, chum (dog) salmon, and a couple of pink salmon.  I caught four species of salmon in one day, an amazing thing.   There wasn’t a chance for silver salmon, which were six weeks away.

RR:  Does New Jersey Audubon get involved in fishery issues?
TG:  It doesn’t generally, except with the Horsheshoe Crab decline, which was affecting shorebird populations.  There are other groups, the America Littoral Society among them, that deal very well with that.

RR:  How did you come to the New Jersey Audubon Society?
TG:  I was looking for something different.  I came to New Jersey Audubon in 1983, so this is twenty-five years…They asked me during the interview with the society—was I going to repeat the five year stay?—and I told them that N.J. Audubon had unlimited potential, a terrific staff, and that New Jersey needed a strong environmental organization.  But that if they hired me, and it was the same organization after five years, they could fire me.  But if it wasn’t, I might be able to look at it as more of a challenge down the road.

RR:  So you moved in 1983 to Lorrimer Sanctuary in Franklin Lakes, where you got housing, and where you still live.  What other sanctuaries were there back then?
TG:  There was Lorrimer, and Scherman (soon to be Scherman-Hoffman), and Rancocas, and a very haphazard Cape May Bird Observatory.

RR:  Rich Kane and Pat Kane were at Scherman, and Karl Anderson at Rancocas, and Pete Dunne was about to take over at CMBO.
TG:  But we were somewhat handicapped there, in Cape May, because the owner of the building, Anne Northwood, was something of a character.

CMBO was the last center that I toured after I was hired.  I went to meet Pete for the first time at Cape May Point, and I had trouble finding the place at Lily Lake.  Then I saw the sign down in the weeds, and I was a little annoyed that the place was all overgrown.   But there were several people around and I didn’t want to embarrass Pete, so I just suggested we take a walk and go birding for a while.  And then he told me about Anne Northwood, that she had a habit of taking off her clothes, and other unusual behaviors. 

RR:  And how many members did New Jersey Audubon have when you joined the staff?
TG:  Between three and four thousand.

RR: What do you think about what’s happened in Cape May in the last thirty years?  It now seems to be—arguably or not—the world capital of birding.
TG:  I think the birds were always there, you just needed a charismatic individual to let the world know that.   If Pete Dunne had never existed, the chamber of commerce would have had to invent him…He and the Suttons and David Sibley and a whole lot of others have done so much for Cape May.  

And Cape May, and the popularity and depth of its ecotourism, have played a large role in our efforts for the Horseshoe Crab and preservation efforts down there.

RR:  When did you first visit Cape May?
TG:  I first came here when I was twelve, but not for birds.  My parents had rented a place in Wildwood, and it rained all week—and what do you do?  We drove down there, looked for Cape May diamonds, and saw the Concrete Ship—and those were the attractions we’d read about in the brochure!

RR:  The “diamonds” are really pieces of quartz washed down from the old Appalachians along the upper Delaware River, and the ship is considerably diminished since we saw it as kids, though the birds still love it.
TG:  But I got to know Cape May a little better later on.  I went to Germantown High School, an inner city school with some problems, and the principal there was Ernie Choate*, who was a member of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club (DVOC); and he had a house in Cape May.  When I was a senior, one of the teachers hired a friend and me to paint her house in Stone Harbor—she paid us from the time we left Philadelphia until the time we returned home, and we stayed at her place, painted for twelve hours a day, made good money, got tans, and went in the ocean a lot.  Ernie later called us down to the principal’s office and asked us to paint his house.  That never happened, but I started to get to know some people from the DVOC, including a guy named Charlie Wonderly.

RR:  I remember going on some pelagics with him in the late 1970s.
TG:  He was at Schuylkill Valley Nature Center when I worked there in high school and college…He was a wonderful volunteer, and I learned all about the DVOC from him.

RR:  Let’s talk about some of the things that have happened since you came to New Jersey Audubon in 1983.  New Jersey’s wetland law is one of the best in the country, and I know the society and you played a large part in its passage.
TG:  The wetlands law was passed in 1987.  That was the first real major conservation initiative that we took during my tenure. 

In fact, in 1983 Rich Kane was in Africa leading a trip at the time, and I had been working with Tom Wells of the N.J. Conservation Foundation, looking for a sponsor for the initial bill…and I told people that N.J. Audubon would become a chair of the coalition, thinking that I could get Rich to do it when he returned, but he was too busy and begged off…So I thought I could just take a year out of my life and get this legislation passed.  I look back and realize how naïve I was at the time, back when the New Jersey builders were making major contributions to both parties to not even post a bill for a vote.

RR:  I remember Alan Karcher and some others from that time.
TG:  I learned a lot about wetlands, and helped formed the N.J. Freshwater Wetlands Campaign.  I chaired it, with Tom Wells as my right arm, and we had about sixty groups involved…Every Monday and Thursday I’d be in Trenton testifying… it just opened up my eyes to so many things, how politics is played in New Jersey…

…When the senate president said he’d post the bill for a vote—it had been held prisoner for nine months—the rumor got around that it was a pro-hunting bill that would actually degrade wetlands, and it wasn’t posted because they said that the environmental community was supposedly divided…a cute trick…

…Once, three busloads of workers were hired to picket the Passaic River hearings…you had to pass through an angry line to get into the place…It was not a comfortable thing to testify on wetlands at some times and places…But we had a face-to-face or phone meetings with all but one of the legislature’s representatives.  It was very labor intensive.

…We eventually got the governor, Tom Kean, on board.  It was his second term, and the wetlands act would become his legacy.  I don’t know what kind of deals he had to make, but Senator Gormley, who had always been against the bill, eventually came out in favor of it.

TG:  Our crowning piece of that legislation was the threatened and endangered species language, and the buffer language, both of which were Rich Kane’s work.  We could have had the bill passed earlier, but without buffers.  But we stuck with 150 feet, and we won. 

RR:  And the buffers and the endangered species regulations make a huge difference in the wetland law’s effectiveness.
TG:  I was speaking at a wetlands conference in Princeton back then…and I remember a guy from the New Jersey Builders Association pointing to sections on a colored map and saying, “All this is what will be lost”…
And I said, “No, all this is the area that will be saved.”

This is the first of a two-part interview with Tom Gilmore.

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*Dr Ernest Choate (1900-1980) was a longtime summer and later permanent resident of Cape May Point, and a great authority on Cape May birds.  Ernie was the first president of the Cape May Geographic Society, compiled the Cape May Christmas Bird Count for twenty years, and was the author of the memorable Dictionary of American Bird Names.   He also wrote the section on “Additional Species Recorded (since 1937)” in the 1965 Dover reprint of Witmer Stone’s Bird Studies at Old Cape May.
(Clay and Pat Sutton.  2006.  Birds and Birding at Cape May. Stackpole Press, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania; p. 443).