[mou] Fwd: Obituary of ornithology great: Harold Mayfield

[Gene Bauer]

I thought you might find this of interest.

Gene Bauer

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From: Margie Mayfield <mayfield@MSI.UCSB.EDU>
Date: January 30, 2007 1:02:10 PM CST
To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU
Subject: Obituary of ornithology great: Harold 
Mayfield

Obituary for Renowned Ornithologist Harold 
Mayfield

(Obituary from the Toledo Blade)

Harold F. Mayfield, 95, an acclaimed 
ornithologist whose research unlocked the secrets 
of the rare Kirtland's warbler, and a personnel 
executive at Owens-Illinois Inc. who used his 
work experience to come up with a method to 
calculate species' nesting success, died Saturday 
in the Swan Creek Retirement Village. He had been 
in declining health for about seven months.

Formerly of Waterville, Mr. Mayfield lived at the 
retirement village for several years. He retired 
at 60 from O-I to spend more time on ornithology, 
the scientific study of birds. "I've been an 
example of what an amateur can do," Mr. Mayfield 
told The Blade in 2002 after he was chosen to 
receive the Robert Ridgway Award from the 
American Birding Association for a lifetime of 
publications in field ornithology. Still, his 
amateur status was a formality. He published more 
than 200 scholarly papers.

He was, at various times, president of the 
American Ornithologists' Union, the Wilson 
Ornithological Society, and the Cooper 
Ornithological Society - the only person to have 
led ornithology's three major organizations.

His 1960 monograph about the Kirtland's warbler 
was considered central to solving the mysteries 
of the endangered species, which until recent 
years nested only in a narrow section of northern 
Lower Michigan. It winters only in the Bahamas.

The species only nests in sandy soil beneath 
stands of jack pine trees young enough to still 
have lower branches close to the ground. That 
means the birds depend for their survival on 
periodic forest fires that clear old-growth trees 
and allow the regrowth of jack pines to provide 
ground cover. Mr. Mayfield found that the 
brown-headed cowbird, which lays its eggs in 
other species' nests, could be especially 
devastating to the Kirtland's warbler population. 
His research led to aggressive trapping of the 
cowbirds in the Kirtland's range. He helped 
develop a federal-state-private Kirtland's 
warbler recovery plan in 1974. The species, at 
its low point several decades ago, had 167 males. 
There are more than 1,400 now. According to the 
Michigan Department of Natural Resources, all 
nests until 1996 were found within 60 miles of 
one site. Since then, a small number of nests 
have been found each year in the Upper Peninsula, 
and the species has nested in Wisconsin and 
Ontario. "That's quite remarkable," said Elliot 
Tramer, a University of Toledo professor of 
ecology and a longtime friend. "No one has played 
a larger role than Harold in the recovery of the 
Kirtland's warbler from extinction." Mr. 
Mayfield's monograph was deemed "the most 
important recent work on the birds in the Western 
Hemisphere" by the American Ornithologists' 
Union, which in 1961 gave him its top honor, the 
Brewster Memorial Award, for his work. " That 
study pretty much set the standard for life 
history studies of birds. It was so thorough and 
well done," Mr. Tramer said.

Mr. Mayfield long had an interest in the polar 
regions. He was widely known for his research 
into the red phalarope, a seabird that nests on 
the Arctic shore for only a few weeks annually, 
spending the rest of its life in the world's 
oceans. In the bird study world, Mr. Mayfield was 
most known for his "Mayfield Method," used to 
calculate a species' nesting success. Mr. 
Mayfield, who had a master's degree in 
mathematics, said that the method was an 
outgrowth of his professional work at O-I in 
calculating workplace safety records." Without 
formal training in ornithology - he was 
essentially self-taught - he was able to make 
these remarkable contributions," Mr. Tramer said.

Mr. Mayfield received many awards, among them the 
Arthur A. Allen Award of the Cornell Laboratory 
of Ornithology in 1990 and a Lifetime Achievement 
Award from the Toledo Naturalists' Association in 
2003.

Born in Minneapolis, he was adopted as an infant 
and grew up in Burlington, Iowa, and Alton, Ill., 
where he attended high school. He received a 
bachelor's degree from Shurtleff College, now 
part of Southern Illinois University, and a 
master's degree from the University of Illinois 
at Urbana/Champaign. He taught high school a 
short time before he was hired in 1935 by what is 
now O-I at its plant in Alton. He was athletic 
into adulthood, playing tennis and 
semi-professional basketball until a stroke at 
28. He was partially paralyzed for a time and 
walked with a limp for several months. He took 
stock afterward and began bird watching to relax. 
As his interest grew, he visited the University 
of Michigan and became friends with the curator 
of birds there. The curator had begun a study of 
the Kirtland's warbler; Mr. Mayfield continued 
the work after the curator's death. Mr. Mayfield 
was also respected in personnel management and 
was the author of more than 90 papers on 
workplace matters. His work appeared in the 
Harvard Business Review. For his accomplishments 
in business and biology, he received honorary 
doctorates from Bowling Green State University 
and Occidental College in California.

Surviving Harold are his wife, Virginia, whom he 
married in 1936; sons, John and Charles Mayfield; 
daughters, Sigrid Boie and Sheryl "Mindy" 
Mayfield; four grandchildren, and two 
great-grandchildren.