Why a Green Kingfisher?

Tribute to a Grandparent-Birder, Part 1

Readers of this publication will have perhaps noticed a small, brightly colored illustration in the upper left-hand corner—a perched green and white bird with an orange-brown breast and an outsized bill.

The bird is a Green Kingfisher, a small member of the kingfisher family whose range in the United States is limited to southern Texas and the southeast corner of Arizona. That thumbnail, which serves as my profile picture across numerous social media platforms, was taken from a larger work.

The bespectacled gentleman is my grandfather, Bill Bowler, as drawn by my dear friend and partner blogger, the illustrator and cartoonist Josh Shalek. That piece of art originally served as the banner for my short-lived (though technically extant) birding blog. I’ll have more to say about the bird and Josh in a minute, but for now back to Grandpa.

In September of 1915, Fred and Nellie Bowler of Cleveland, Ohio were tasked with the job of naming their newborn baby. That same year, the local professional baseball team, ready to ditch the nickname Naps (after former player-manager Nap Lajoie), was also in search of new moniker. In an almost inexplicable lack of judgment, the team failed to adopt a bird name (had they communed with my unborn self, I would have insisted on Canvasbacks), instead landing on the unfortunate choice of Indians.

Fred and Nellie did much better in christening their baby. William Wallace Bowler came to be known as Bill by those closest to him. Bill is very birdy name, and I like to think his parents knew exactly what they were doing, and were even showing some impressive prescience, when they chose it.

The ballclub’s naming gaffe aside, young William quickly got hooked on Cleveland baseball. He grew up watching Indians games at League Park and idolizing right handed pitcher Wes Ferrell.

At University School, Bill was a talented prep school pitcher in his own right, though it was not his right arm but his formidable brain he rode to superstardom. He graduated with a business degree from Dartmouth College before tacking toward organic chemistry, in which he earned a master’s from the University of Houston and, back home in Cleveland, a PhD from Western Reserve University.

At some point in the late 1930s, Gramp came into the employment of shipping and mining company Pickands Mather in Cleveland. There he met a diminutive but fiery Pennsylvanian named Florence Cross, the woman who would one day be known as Gram. Though they could hardly know it at the time, Bill and Florence’s blended DNA would spawn not only three children and eight grandchildren, but also a lifelong passion for birds across multiple generations.

Florence and Bill Bowler with their less-than-enthused daughter Fay. Photo courtesy of Jan Schweikert

After bouncing around a bit, including a stint in Texas, Gramp moved his science chops and his family back to northeast Ohio, this time to Akron, where he began his career at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. At Firestone he applied his expertise in latex and polymers, even earning a patent along the way. You can read US Patent #3,483,174, “The Process for Coagulating Latices of Co-polymers and Terpolymers of Conjugated Dienes and Carboxylic Acids” (whatever the hell that means), right here. (Note—Birding With Billbow assumes no responsibility whatever for any long-term catatonic or comatose state induced by the reading of US Patent #3,483,174.)

Apparently Akron was just the right speed for Gram and Gramp. They built their dream house a bit north of Akron proper, settling for good in Bath Township in 1954.

Gram and Gramp’s charming mid-century modern home. Photo courtesy of Jan Schweikert

Over the next four decades, that modest three-bedroom, one-bathroom home was the epicenter of our family, a paradise of wiffle ball, music, cocktails, croquet, climbing trees, books, board games, gourmet meals, and, yes, birds.

And here we come to it. Sometime in the late 50s, their middle child Mike (whom I occasionally refer to as “Dad”), began noticing birds. Really noticing them, and trying to identify them. Though he doesn’t remember how or why it started, Dad’s interest seemed to spark a shared interest in my grandparents, who by 1960 were keeping track of what birds they saw and where, especially around their property. At some point that year, Gramp came into possession of a small spiral-bound notebook. In it, he jotted the dates and locations their sightings. The earliest entry was from 1960, a Pileated Woodpecker they spotted in a friend’s yard on June 29th. It was an emphatic beginning to a long life of birding.

By 1970, Gram and Gramp were comfortable enough that he was able to retire at the age of 55. Soon, their casual hobby became a passion that had them searching for birds far and wide across Canada and the US, from Algonquin Provincial Park to Florida, Texas to Alaska, California to British Columbia, most of the miles traveled in the two Volkswagen Vanagons they owned in the 1970s and 80s.

The second of two white VW Volkswagens. Photo courtesy of Jan Schweikert

In that time they visited dozens of birding hotspots. Their life lists grew. Ever meticulous, Gramp would grab a checklist from the visitor’s center and carefully tick off the species they found. Over the next 25 years he amassed quite a collection of checklists, which he stored in a hanging file folder that eventually came into my possession. I thank my relatives for entrusting these precious documents to my care.

Gramp’s interests were wide and varied, and he applied the same exacting mind that made him an excellent chemist to just about everything he did. He was an expert in early jazz and had a meticulously curated collection of 78 records from the 1920s and 30s. Later he became interested in viti- and viniculture, and the wines he made from grapes he grew were of high enough quality to win prizes in local competitions. For a time, he excelled at tennis and golf. Yes, when Bill Bowler put his mind to something, he did it right and he did it well.

You’re lucky if you get two parents who do their best to make a decent person out of you. I did. You’re doubly lucky if you get four grandparents who want to spoil you rotten. Had that too, and that’s where Gramp shined brightest in my eyes. Because it’s one thing to be a renaissance man, which he certainly was, but quite another to have enough love, patience, and generosity to indulge a 15-year-old goober who is ravenous for just about everything stored in that capacious 75-year-old brain. Happily, Gramp loved regaling me with his encyclopedic knowledge of Cleveland baseball. He tutored me tirelessly on his jazz heroes, especially Louis Armstrong (whose hand he once shook!). He even invited me to participate in the winemaking process, letting me crush grapes in his press and explaining fermentation in a way even a C student in chemistry could understand. Yes, Gramp spoiled me rotten, and he did it without ever so much as slipping me a fiver (Gram did that).

Gramp could have found my fawning obnoxious, but I think my growing interest in his passions forged a bond. Whenever the sounds of a spinning record were drowned by chatter, it was to me he’d look. “Nate, this beautiful music is playing and everyone’s just blathering on about nothing.”

In a lot of ways, Grandpa Bowler is the standard by which I want to live my life, and I hope I’ve inherited some his best qualities in some measure—the quick wit, the curious nature, the gentle manner. Some of it I know he passed down to me—a preference for Beefeater martinis, questionable sartorial taste…above all a fierce love of family and, until the day she left this world in 1999, a fathomless adoration of his wife.

In some ways we are irreconcilably different. I have a humanist’s brain that was never going to excel in math and science. He had an impatient streak I hope I didn’t inherit—one moronic comment or, god help you, perceived slight toward my grandmother and Bill Bowler would deliver a verbal takedown with the deadly speed and precision of a Great Blue Heron lancing a frog. Perhaps where we part ways most strikingly though is in how messy and disorganized I am.

Except when it comes to birds. In all things bird-related I’m pretty goddam organized.

And so I knew in the age of digital everything, the one gesture I could perform to honor his care in birding was to modernize his birding archive, bring those moldering pages back to life. That’s why last year I took a deep dive into into his journals, checklists, and Christmas Bird Count records and cobbled together a posthumous eBird account for Gram and Gramp, which, thanks to his meticulous note taking, contains 370 of the 494 species they observed together. I invite you to visit their eBird profile, which I hope I can continue to add to as I unearth more records.

eBird was still a year or so from launching when Gramp passed away in 2001, but I’m certain he would get a real kick out of knowing the notes and checklists he took across four decades would be contributing to science more than 20 years after his death.

And now I’ll finally get to what this all has to do with a Green Kingfisher. There’s a reason I asked Josh to depict Gramp with that specific bird. Though it’s highly unlikely that the bashful Green Kingfisher would volunteer to perch on anyone’s shoulder, the bird is central to Bowler Family birding lore.

In April of 1994, our family took one of our annual camping trips to south Texas. In their protracted retirement, my grandparents would spend winters making months-long treks through much of the southern and southwestern USA, birding, visiting friends and family, and largely avoiding Akron winters. For a few years, it became tradition for my dad, brother, and I to fly to Texas during spring break to join them for a week of birding in Big Bend National Park. Though I had grudgingly participated in a couple of Christmas Bird Counts and had some cursory knowledge of the backyard birds of northeast Ohio, two trips to Big Bend were the seed-planting start of my birding career.

On my first trip, I got a field guide of my own. Naturally I mimicked Gramp in choosing a (unbeknownst to me, outdated) Golden Guide, and naturally I also mimicked his habit of jotting bird sightings on the pages.

Gramp’s field guide (neat handwriting) on left. My field guide (shitty handwriting) on right

But it was during my second trip in 1994 that we prioritized finding the elusive Green Kingfisher. By this time, Gramp was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. His quick mind was getting derailed, and things he was so good at, setting up a campsite for example, proved suddenly challenging. Even so, he was plenty cognizant enough to know he wanted to see a Green Kingfisher, and his body was spry, and when during a hike at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge a local guide* shouted “GREEN KINGFISHER!” Granddad’s afterburners kicked in. Off he shot in a full sprint toward the voice, and sure enough, moving around the far shore of a pond, resplendent in emerald and chestnut, was the Green Kingfisher. Gram, conversely failing in body but not mind, eventually was able to hike the short distance and see the bird as well. That Green Kingfisher was, to my knowledge, the last life bird Bill and Florence Bowler ever recorded.

*Editor’s note—The author of this post apologizes for the massive oversight of not initially crediting his idiot brother Jeffrey, who, in his words, “spotted the Kingfisher FOR the guide.” Birding with BillBow strives for truth and sincerely apologizes for this breach in trust.

Alzheimer’s was no match for joy on that day, just as it was no match for grief when Gram passed away five years later. Deep in the throes of his disease, the veil of memory loss was lifted as Gramp looked into her coffin and wept, aware he was seeing his life’s love for the last time.

And so, dear readers, that’s why a Green Kingfisher. As to why I call this newsletter Birding with BillBow? BillBow is a portmanteau of Bill Bowler that conveniently forms a homonym of one of my favorite characters in literature. The name struck me during one of my pandemic hikes as a fun title for a blog and way to honor both my favorite paternal grandfather and favorite author. I don’t think Gramp was a Tolkien acolyte. He read voraciously, but I never knew him as a fan of fantasy. He certainly appreciated a clever wordplay when he heard one though, and he was never one to shy away from a pun, no matter how awful. And so I’ll end this tale with his infamous joke about sea salt, which he told repeatedly at the dinner table, much to Gram’s dismay and his utter delight.

“Pass the sea salt, please. Not the A salt, not the B salt, the C salt.”

Featured Photo—The Family Historian

My cousin Jan birding in style with Gram and Gramp. Photo courtesy of Jan Schweikert

This post would not have been possible without the help of Bill and Florence’s first grandchild, my cousin Jan Schweikert. Jan is the undisputed master of Bowler Family lore, and she was quick to provide copious information and photographs from the life and times of our grandparents. Every family should have a historian like Jan, whose organization and wide knowledge would make Gramp Bowler proud.

10/10 Recommends

Josh Shalek

I met Josh in 2002 when we were upcoming corporate drones at Barnes & Noble in Boulder, Colorado. My writerly ambitions were in a nascent state in those days, but Josh was already cranking out his daily comic strip, The Family Monster. We bonded over a shared appreciation of Calvin and Hobbes and Bob Dylan, and a shared frustration that the comics pages in every daily newspaper seemed to be dominated by strips that premiered when Bill Bowler was still baffling high school batters with his curveball. Josh’s work is a love note to monsters, pirates, robots, dinosaurs, and his daughter, and his art has been inextricably tied to my writing for nearly two decades. I’ve also cherished our collaborations over the years, and that’s why I’m excited to announce we’ll be launching new joint project in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! 📷 🦉🖌️ 🎨

That’s all for this week. Do you come from a birding family? Are you trying (like me) to pass birding on to a new generation? Have you done any archiving of checklists from bird hikes past? I’d love to hear all about it. You know where 👇

Until next time, bird your Grandpa’s ass off!

nwb

This post was human-generated. All photos and videos by Nathaniel Bowler unless otherwise noted.