Needham History: Needham’s Naturalist

Still climbing trees at the age of 67

“Lapland Longspur,” a detail from Timothy Otis Fuller’s 1912 journal. The 1912 journal is by far the most comprehensive and lavishly-illustrated of the four journals. It is currently on display at the Needham History Center.

Needham’s Naturalist:
the Bird Journals of Timothy Otis Fuller

“Linnaeus, letting fall his hand on a bunch of Moss at his side, exclaimed, ‘Underneath this palm is material for the study of a lifetime’; and if this is true
of a handful of Moss, the treasures of a township must be inexhaustible. We need not seek for new worlds to conquer. Rather let us say with the poet, ‘I walk the hills my feet first knew, and year by year they grow dearer and dearer to me.’ ”
– Timothy Otis Fuller, A Sketch of the Flora of Needham, 1886

Timothy Otis Fuller (1845-1916) was a naturalist, and his field of study was Needham. Fuller’s roots in Needham reached very deep – he was born into a family that had settled this area in the 1600s, and members of the Fuller family signed the petition that established Needham as a separate town from Dedham in 1711.

Timothy Otis (as he was generally known) was born in 1845, the second of the five children of Ezra Fuller, Jr. and Catherine Smith Fuller. Fuller’s mother, and her brother Timothy Newell Smith, were both talented artists, and they taught Fuller as a youngster to draw and paint. Fuller also formed a friendship with his neighbor, the physician Josiah Noyes (1801-1875), and became his protégé in the study of natural history. Noyes was a natural scientist in the broad 19th-century sense, and his interests encompassed not only his profession of medicine and chemistry, but also plants, birds, the weather, geography, languages, and religion. He shared his knowledge, notebooks, and collections with Fuller – in fact, many of Noyes’ notes and collections were continued and expanded by Fuller to the extent that the two became intertwined.

Fuller modeled himself on Thoreau, whom he called “the Mastermind.” He considered himself first and foremost to be a botanist, and most of his writings and collections are of local plants. His knowledge was based on patient and minute observation. His notes were primarily kept in his herbaria, and in his field journals, painstakingly compiled and revised over the years. Also like Thoreau, Fuller was a prodigious walker, walking in the pursuit of his studies to Woonsocket on one occasion, and as far as Ipswich on another. Most of Fuller’s “rambles,” however, took place within the confines of Needham, where he examined every brook, every woodland, even the waste places beside the roads.

The Bird Journals

“We have a better way of studying birds these days than by shooting them. There is little need for killing a bird in identifying it … We now have museums filled with ample specimens of every species, and books are to be cheaply bought giving accurate descriptions of every bird we can hope to see. So we arm ourselves with that indispensable weapon of the modern bird-gazer, an opera glass…”
– Lecture at the Unitarian Chapel, 5 March 1905.

Although his herbaria and botany notebooks make up the bulk of Fuller’s work, the bird journals are by far the most detailed and beautiful. Because of his aversion to killing the birds in order to study them, Fuller chose to use his considerable artistic skill to record the characteristics of the species he saw.

There are four volumes extant. Internal evidence – the dates of entries and annotations – suggest that these four are the total. They are dated 1904, 1906, 1908 and 1912, though some of the observations date as early as 1901. Together with his unpublished writings on birds, all dating after 1900, it seems that ornithology as a systematic study was a later interest in Fuller’s life, taken up as he reached his sixth decade.

The books show a clear progression of sophistication over time. The first volume (1904) is spare and modest. The relatively few illustrations are ink sketches in black and white, tipped in after the entries were written. In 1906, the tipped-in illustrations are in color, painted by Fuller as he had been taught by his mother and uncle many years before. By 1908, the illustrations are integrated into the text, as they are in 1912, though extra notes, pictures, and bird-song continue to be stuck onto the pages over time.

The journals are a dynamic record of Fuller’s observations and his researches. Entries in the journals record the dates when the bird was active in the Needham area, and the bird’s physical characteristics – its size, coloring, songs, identifying features, and so forth. Ongoing memoranda of local sightings are appended to the entries:

“Cooper’s Hawk: Ridge Hill, May 10, 1908, in white pine 60 ft up, 5 fresh eggs. Also beyond Cartwright’s, in white pine 20 ft up, May 18, 1909. May 11, 1912, High Rock woods 20 ft in oak, 1 egg.”

Tucked into the margins and between the lines are references from journals such as The Auk, notes from scientific publications, and from the work of colleagues – “[Bradford] Torrey says [Lincoln’s Sparrow] often has a breast spot like Song Sparrow.”

The 1912 volume is the grandest production, bearing the title A Rambler’s Companion in the Woods and Fields and Along the Shores of New England. This volume is a synthesis of the previous three. Information from the earlier years is summarized and consolidated into an authoritative local field guide. This is also the most lavishly-illustrated of the four. Although Fuller enjoyed good health his later years, it is likely that by 1912 his tree-climbing days were coming to an end, and he was summing up his work.

Illustrating each entry is a stunning little work of art. It may be as small as a profile of the bird’s head, or it may be the full body. There are pages of feature comparisons – heads, beaks, wings, tails. Portraits are tipped in to the seams. Occasionally little vignettes ornament the text itself, as with an entry on the Snow Bunting (1912) – “ Maynard [Newton naturalist Charles Johnson Maynard] says that a flock flying appears like drifting leaves, each bird wandering right and left, above and below” – in which a small flock of buntings fly in from the margin and into the manuscript. The text might be bordered by the long bill of the Sickle-Bill (now Long-Bill) Curlew, or describe a curve around the fat rump of an Eider.

Scientific Value

“After untold centuries of survival of those best adapted to the various conditions under which they live, the several species [of birds] as we now see them around us, could continue to hold their own in the same abundance for centuries to come; but there is one disturbing element in all this, and that arises from the very one that should be their chief protector – man himself.”
– Lecture at the Unitarian Chapel, 5 March 1905

Although we treasure the Fuller journals because they are so beautiful, their real value lies in what they can tell us about changes in the bird population over time. The familiar woodsy New England landscape around us is mostly secondary growth. Settlement and farming in the colonial period largely deforested our area. Paintings of Needham from the mid-1800s, as well as early maps and photos, show a cleared landscape of fields and meadows. Modern views of these same scenes show a significant regrowth of the tree cover. In Fuller’s time, the landscape was in transition; the decline of farming in favor of mercantilism and manufacturing, soon to be followed by the local transition to a suburban residential community, favored this process of modest reforestation. Thus the Needham landscape that Fuller knew was different from the one we know, and since we can identify from his notes where many of his observations were made, it is possible to enumerate some of the differences.

In addition to the bird descriptions, Fuller kept census records of the birds he saw each year. These records are readily compared to modern population data. For example, in 1912 Fuller made a table of the migration dates of warblers in eastern Massachusetts. The earliest species to arrive in 1912 was the common little Pine Warbler; he first observed it in the last week of March, and consistently throughout the summer thereafter. The Black-and-White Warbler, the Black-throated Green, and the Yellow Warbler – all common species then as now – arrived about a month later. The Cape May, Tennessee, and Bay-Breasted Warblers made a brief appearance in mid-May as they migrated northward. More interesting, the Blue-winged Warbler, now fairly common here in the summer, was rare here in 1912; its habitat has been shifting to the north. Conversely, the Golden-winged and Nashville Warblers, whose ranges are now contracting, were common here in Fuller’s day.

In other volumes, Fuller recorded sightings over time, or relative abundance. In the period 1901-1907 he saw Turkey Vultures only three years out of the seven; these are birds now seen daily in Needham, often circling in groups of three or four, as the range of both Turkey Vultures and Black Vultures has shifted northward.

Hawks of various species, even the now-common red-tailed hawk, were not always seen. Fuller noted that the birds of prey were becoming increasingly scarce, and that the red-shouldered hawk was the only raptor to be commonly seen in Needham. On the other hand, bald eagles, though scarce, were noted for every year of the seven. Northern Cardinals and Mourning Doves were rarer in Fuller’s day; and that most pestilential of species – the European Starling – was still unknown in rural habitats, having newly been introduced into New York’s Central Park.

This is only a cursory tour of the information contained in Fuller’s field books. Much more can be extracted from the journal entries, the tables, and the various notes he kept. A comparison of Fuller’s information with data from systematic local census records can yield useful information about local habitat and climate change in the last century. This is work for the future – but not too distant, we hope.

So, we learn about birds from Fuller’s books, but we also learn about Fuller. A man of patience and precision, surely, who recorded every fact and image in painstaking detail. A man respected by his colleagues and neighbors for the breadth of his knowledge. But for all that a man of great sensibility and enthusiasm, who never lost his wonder at the infinite variety of nature, and who would still climb 20 feet up a tree to peer into a hawk’s nest at the age of 67.

“One of the first evidences of the approach of spring is the arrival of the migrating birds from their winter homes in the south; always an event of great importance to the bird crank. And I hope I may always be considered one, in the spring at least. Thoreau says, ‘If the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past.’ Judged by this, I am right in the heyday of my youth.”

“Wrens and Kinglets,” from the 1908 journal. The illustration comparing the birds’ heads, and the song of the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet in musical notation were pasted in as additions.

Gloria Polizzotti Greis is the Executive Director of the Needham History Center & Museum. For more information, please see their website at www.needhamhistory.org.