Walter Edmond Clyde Todd

Background

Walter was born on September 6, 1874 in Smithfield, Ohio. He was the son of William Todd, a school principal, and Isabella Hunter.

Education

As a boy, he became a careful and knowledgeable observer of birds and, at thirteen, published in the O"logist, his first contribution to a scientific journal. His formal education ended with graduation from high school in Beaver, Pa. , where the family had moved in 1877.

He entered Geneva College in 1891 but within a few weeks withdrew to accept an apprenticeship in the Division of Ornithology and Mammalogy (later the Biological Survey) in the Department of Agriculture. During his six years in Washington, Todd acquired not only specialized knowledge and skills but also, from study on his own, a good substitute for a college education.

Career

While in Washington Todd became acquainted with a number of scientists and others in the emerging field of ornithology. But Washington offered neither the prospect of field experience nor chance of advancement, and in 1899 he resigned to become curator of birds at the newly founded Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

That association was to last seventy years, in the first twenty-five of which the director, less interested in the advancement of knowledge than in popular education, denied Todd support for research. To finance his expeditions and the preparation and publication of his books, Todd had to develop his own sources of support.

As curator, Todd classified large collections of neotropical birds acquired by the museum. From his pen came more than a thousand pages of articles describing these specimens. In 1896, after a severe bout of malaria, he was cautioned to avoid travel in the tropics, and so, he never visited some areas about which he published extensively. Early in his career Todd recognized that the avifauna of northern Canada was almost entirely unknown and fixed on it as a field for study.

In 1901 he made the first of eighteen expeditions to the region between Hudson's Bay and the Atlantic. Problems of transport, logistics, and weather were massive, and financial support was scant. With extraordinary persistence, even when past seventy, Todd did his share of the strenuous work in the unmapped wilderness, where travel was by canoe and backpack and where dogsleds and power boats were luxuries.

A perfectionist, Todd wanted to produce a comprehensive treatise that would embrace the findings of other competent scholars who had invaded parts of the vast territory in which Todd felt that he had earned a monopoly. As a result, it was 1943 before The Birds of the Labrador Peninsula and Adjacent Regions: A Distributional List appeared. With more than 800 pages, each with two columns of small print, the volume is distinguished for its graceful and often spirited writing. Todd's permanent residence in the upper Ohio Valley enabled him to extend fieldwork into the western half of Pennsylvania.

In 1940 he succeeded in publishing, with support from friends and foundations, his exhaustive Birds of Western Pennsylvania, a work of more than 700 pages that incorporated, with appropriate acknowledgment, the work of others with his own observations and conclusions. Todd's central interest all his life was the geographical distribution of bird life.

As early as 1900, his field studies had made him skeptical of the concept of "life zones" put forward by C. H. Merriam and J. A. Allen, in which habitats are defined in terms of latitude and altitude. Todd found that his data could be better accommodated to the concept of the "biome, " which characterizes habitat as an array of plant and animal forms at a particular period. No ornithologist in Todd's long professional life could escape the controversy over recognizing as distinct species, rather than as subspecies, birds with minor differences in appearance or measurement.

Todd was independent and judicious, but time has confirmed his reluctance to expand the list of species.

He died in Rochester, Pa.

Achievements

• Walter Edmond Clyde Todd was a very notable ornithologist, whose major works are Birds of Western Pennsylvania (1940) and Birds of the Labrador peninsula and adjacent areas (1963) Todd's research was based entirely on the collections of bird skins he had amassed at the Carnegie Museum, but he still won the Brewster Prize (the Pulitzer of the ornithological world) for it. Todd Nature Reserve, located off Route 28 and Highway 356 in Butler County, is named for W. E. Clyde Todd and is open to the public dawn to dusk throughout the year (with the exception of hunting season in November–December). The ASWP annually awards the W. E. Clyde Todd Award to recognize "an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to conservation in western Pennsylvania. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Birds of the Santa Marta Region of Colombia: A Study in Altitudinal Distribution

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Birds of the Labrador Peninsula and Adjacent Areas, a Distributional List

    (Birds of the Labrador Peninsula and Adjacent Areas, a Dis...)

  • The birds of Erie and Presque Isle, Erie County, Pennsylvania

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Birds of Western Pennsylvania

    (Pp. 710, 22 color plates by G. Sutton, folding color map....)

  • On Dysithamnus mentalis and Its Allies
  • A Revision of the Genus Chaemepelia
  • Birds of the Buffalo Creek region, Armstrong and Butler Counties, Pennsylvania: Including the Todd Sanctuary area

Membership

A long-time Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union, he was elected Fellow Emeritus in 1968.

Personality

He was a perfectionist. Todd was independent and judicious.

Quotes from others about the person

• George M. Sutton, a younger ornithologist and later an associate, noted that what Todd "knew about physics, mathematics, and astronomy amazed me. "

Connections

In 1907, Todd married Leila E. Eason of Beaver, Pa. ; they had no children. The couple settled in a new house that he occupied until his death in Rochester, Pa.

Father:

William Todd

He was a school principal.

Mother:

Isabella Hunter

Spouse:

Leila E. Eason

References

• Bird Student: An Autobiography (Texas Pan American Series)
• The Birds of Newfoundland Labrador: Memoirs of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 7