Ludlow Griscom

Ludlow Griscom (June 17, 1890 – May 28, 1959) was an American ornithologist known as a pioneer in field ornithology. His emphasis on the identification of free-flying birds by field marks became widely adopted by professionals and amateurs. Many called him "Dean of the Birdwatchers."

Early life and family Griscom was born in New York City, the son of Clement Acton Griscom Jr. and Genevieve Sprigg Ludlow. Ludlow's grandfather Clement Acton Griscom Sr. was a prominent merchant and shipping executive. His maternal grandfather, William Ludlow, distinguished himself through military service. Griscom's family traces its ancestry back to Thomas Lloyd, a 17th-century physician in Pennsylvania.

The oldest of three children, Ludlow Griscom had a sister, Joyce, who died in childhood, and a brother, Acton. As a boy, Ludlow's interest in birds showed itself as early as 1898. In 1907, he found fellow nature enthusiasts when he joined the Linnaean Society of New York.

Griscom received an A.B. degree, with a major in pre-law, from Columbia University in 1912. Griscom was an enthusiastic opera- and concert-goer and accomplished pianist.

Career

Museum work In 1916, Griscom joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, initially in the ichthyology department where he co-authored one paper on fishes with John Treadwell Nichols. Working under Captain Heber Blankenhorn, a pioneer of U.S. military psychological operations (PSYOP), Griscom contributed to one of the earliest organized PSYOP efforts. His duties included designing and distributing propaganda materials, such as leaflets delivered via hydrogen balloons, aimed at influencing German soldiers and civilians.

Griscom, alongside fellow PSYOP officers like 1LT Charles Merz and 2LT George Ifft II, serving as some of the first U.S. Army PSYOP officers, deployed to forward positions near Verdun, where he experienced combat conditions, including artillery fire. Even amidst the dangers of the Western Front, Griscom’s passion for ornithology endured. In a letter home, he described observing European bird species, including larks and warblers, which he marveled at as a welcome distraction from the chaos of war. Following his discharge in February 1919 after the death of his father, Griscom returned to the United States and resumed his ornithological career. As the organization shifted focus from museum collections to the study of live birds, he contributed his opinions and talents to its transition. He was elected to the Finance Committee in 1934 and later served on the council, a subcommittee for faunistics, and other committees.

Griscom's participation in the AOU was not without friction. At times, he was critical of certain AOU ways and means that he found old-fashioned, in particular the workings of the Check-List Committee; the committee in the 1940s included Alexander Wetmore and James Lee Peters. Peters, who was also Griscom's colleague at the MCZ, was in many ways the antithesis of Griscom: quietly working in the museum while Griscom attracted attention with his rapid field identifications.

Once in Boston, in 1927, Griscom joined the Nuttall Ornithological Club, a limited-membership group of ornithologists that was in certain respects a predecessor of the AOU. He was elected treasurer in 1930 (succeeding Charles Foster Batchelder), was subsequently named a member of the council, and served a term as president from 1952. He gave nearly 50 talks at the club's regularly scheduled meetings on his various field trips and on local bird distribution and migration. As at the AOU, he emphasized identification of birds by field marks rather than in the hand, and the organization's meeting minutes expanded to accommodate his notes of recent sightings.

Also in 1927, Griscom became an associate member of the New England Museum of Natural History, which was sponsored by the Boston Society of Natural History. He became chair of the Society's Budget Committee in 1937 and went on to assume more administrative and financial responsibilities. By the 1940s, the museum was in financial difficulty, and Griscom (now on the board of trustees) worked with new director Bradford Washburn to right the ship. In a controversial move, Griscom organized the sale of a portion of the Society's books (many of which were duplicated within the Boston area), with much of the library going to the University of Southern California. As the decade ended, Washburn and Griscom perceived the need to expand the museum's attendance. They reorganized the institution as the Boston Museum of Science, and with Griscom as president, the new museum opened its doors in 1951.

On the national scene, Griscom became an important member of the National Audubon Society (NAS) in both an editorial and executive capacity. He was a contributing editor to Audubon Magazine and an associate editor of Audubon Field Notes. Whether or not the story of the warbler is entirely true, Griscom was indeed skilled at quickly identifying birds by sight, using diagnostic features first learned from his museum work, and he influenced other birders and ornithologists to use the same techniques. Later in his career, he wrote:

[What] people are now able to do in the way of instantly recognizing a large number of birds by song, notes, tricks of flight, shape, etc, entirely apart from their colors, seems perfectly fabulous to the uninitiated and was flatly declared to be impossible a generation ago... The battle for sight records and field identification of the living bird has been won, so far as I know, and there is no real quarrel left about what birds can be recognized alive and when this recognition can be used in scientific research.

This is not to say that Griscom never collected specimens, as he certainly did so on his Latin American expeditions. In the U.S., he estimated that he collected one bird per year between 1928 and 1945, and he held a permit for scientific collecting until 1955.

Nor did Griscom accept sight records uncritically, viewing himself as a moderate in this respect. While he encouraged amateurs to pursue birding as a sport, he considered many nonprofessionals' published accounts of sightings to be so much clutter in the scientific literature. In his Birds of the New York City Region (1923), he used only those sight records that he considered reliable, and he made the fine distinction between merely reporting an observation and accepting it as a record.

Ludlow Griscom is best remembered for his participation in and promotion of the rising practice of birding by eye and ear—watching birds as a sport. His first Christmas Bird Count was in 1908. He organized counts in the Boston area. He kept personal life and year lists: his North America species total through 1939 was 640. However, his particular passion was for Big Days, a friendly competition in which a team of birders traverses a region, intending to find and identify as many bird species as possible in a 24-hour period. One day, Griscom was able to count 160 species in coastal Massachusetts.

Griscom's Birds of the New York City Region and his works on the faunistics of Massachusetts birds were some of the first books in a new genre: birdfinding guides rather than identification guides. Working from a growing volume of sightings by skilled observers, Griscom provided in these books the details of exactly where a bird could be found in a region (for instance, a specific park or beach), at what time of year (in spring migration, for example), and in what numbers.

In preparing these works, Griscom drew in part on his own records. From 1907 until the end of his life, Griscom transcribed his field notes made during trips in the United States and overseas into a set of large ledger books. He recorded identification details of each bird species, estimated numbers of birds, observed behaviors, and made note of weather conditions. The collected sixteen volumes of these ledgers are in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum.

In the field, Griscom is remembered by friends and students for his virtuosity in identification, enthusiasm, brusque sense of humor, and satisfaction in teaching others the pleasures of birding. He was also a field trip companion with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who accompanied Griscom on a trip through Dutchess County, New York, in 1942.

Protégés It can be argued that Ludlow Griscom's single most important contribution to ornithology and conservation was his influence on Roger Tory Peterson, leading to the first edition of Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. Griscom tested Peterson's paintings for the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, demonstrating that the renderings provided the right details that could be used to identify birds in the field. Peterson himself wrote that his field guides were "profoundly influenced" by Griscom's teaching.

During his New York years, Griscom became a teacher to a group known as the Bronx County Bird Club, As in other areas, his opinions about managing game birds were moderate. He wrote favorably about game management practices in Great Britain; suggested reducing the issuance of non-resident hunting licenses; and argued for a closed season for ducks for a limited period of time, lest the birds become non-migrant and poor game.

Quotes "One need not shoot a bird to know what it was."

Selected publications

400 pp.

190 pp.

156 pp. 340 pp.

320 pp. Introduction and text for 288 plates. 202 pp. 295 pp. 356 pp. 436 pp. 164 pp. Privately printed.