“Pam would open the book and say, ‘OK, which of the birds on this page do you like best?’ Then she would do the same thing for the next page—all the way through the book.” —Sally Rasmussen, Pamela’s sister
When Pamela Rasmussen was 10 years old, she discovered a wild diversity of birds through the pictures on the pages of a book given to her by her mother. Arthur Singer’s illustrations in the junior edition of Birds of the World captivated her. As she flipped through the pages showing each bird in its varied habitat, from penguins to parrots, it was as if she were visiting them in their homes all over the world. In discovering these birds she had found a new world. She now dreamed of traveling all over the planet to see the birds pictured in the book.
Pamela Rasmussen was born on October 16, 1959, in Oregon, where her family lived in the small town of Hillsboro, 20 miles from Portland. In the Pacific Northwest, Pam could only imagine what it would be like to see exotic birds such as hornbills, toucans, and birds of paradise, but there were still local birds she could see. One day, she noticed a long-billed marsh wren singing in some rushes near her home. It was the first of many native birds Pam got to know. She was now so bird crazy that her idea of a perfect birthday was bird watching on the Oregon coast. Each October Pam, her sister, Sally, and their mom piled into the car for a drive to the seashore. No matter the weather, Pam was thrilled by each new species she saw. Sally, however, was not always enthusiastic.
“There we’d be freezing, looking for ducks,” remembered Sally.
Helen Rasmussen was a single mom at this point, and she was devoted to her daughters. She drove Pam into the city to look at bird books in the Portland library. As a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, she felt it was her religious duty to shield Pam from scientific theories such as evolution that she believed contradicted the Christian bible. Each Saturday she took Sally and Pam to church. Unlikely as it may seem, Pam’s relationship with the church ended up connecting her to future bird watching experiences.
In high school when she traveled with other Seventh-Day Adventists to perform a service project in Mexico, Pam finally got to see some of the exotic bird species pictured in Birds of the World, such as colorful tanagers and flashy hummingbirds. Following high school graduation she entered Walla Walla University, a Seventh-Day Adventist school, and the next summer she taught at a missionary school in Kenya. There she saw tropical birds, such as hoopoes, sunbirds, bee-eaters, black kites, and bulbuls. Back in Walla Walla, Pam read about an ornithologist who had recently discovered a new bird species in Peru and imagined herself finding new species of birds someday. Little did she know how important her future discoveries would be.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree in science, Pam remained at Walla Walla College to earn a master’s. Her chance to study birds in the field came in the summer of 1982 when she began research for her master’s project on Protection Island National Wildlife Refuge off the northwest tip of Washington State. Spending day after day in the raucous nesting colony observing nestling pigeon guillemots was an entirely new experience. These small seabirds can dive more than 140 feet below the surface to catch small fish, crabs, and mollusks. They belong in a group of birds called alcids, which includes puffins, murres, razorbills, and auklets, but in some ways they are very different from their close relatives. Instead of feeding their nestlings at night like other alcids, pigeon guillemots provide meals to their little ones during the day. Although the other alcids lay only one egg, pigeon guillemots lay two. Pam took careful measurements of the guillemot nestlings during her two months on the island to find out how fast they grow.
Pam’s study showed that pigeon guillemot nestlings develop more rapidly than those of other alcids, despite the fact that the adults must feed two chicks. Catching food during the day appeared to be a great advantage. One day during her research Pam noticed that one nestling had eaten its nest mate. Though cannibalism is common among hawks and owls, this was the first time the behavior had been observed in alcids. When Pam reported it in the Wilson Bulletin, it was the first of many articles she would publish in a scientific publication.
Having braved a summer in a nesting colony and earned her master’s degree, she was now ready to further investigate the life of birds. The next step in Pam’s education would be as a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, and her next field research would take place along the remote and rugged coasts of southern South America. Living along these coastlines are king and blue-eyed shags, also called cormorants, which are very similar in behavior and coloration. Pam wondered whether they were different species or merely varieties of the same species. To solve this mystery, she first examined shag skins in museum collections. Then in 1985, she traveled to the coasts of southern Chile, Argentina, and the Falkland Islands with her professor and a postdoctoral student. Her aim was to observe shags and collect specimens to make study skins.
The shags roosted along the rocky coasts that the researchers visited via a small inflatable boat. Pam was nervous every time a whale breached, sometimes only a few meters away, but she soon got used to them. Even in summer the weather in the region—close to Antarctica—is often wet, windy, and cold, which often made camping and fieldwork uncomfortable. Pam was frustrated that she did not speak Spanish, the language of both Chile and Argentina, and having to rise at dawn after eating dinner at the customary 10:00 PM left her exhausted. Overall she was happy to be observing shags in the beautiful landscape. Little by little, as she pieced together the relationship between the king and blue-eyed shag, Pam became confident that rather than being subspecies, they were actually forms of the same species, Phalacrocorax atriceps.
In 1992, with her PhD completed, Pam landed her dream job at the Smithsonian Institution working for S. Dillon Ripley. As head of the Smithsonian for 20 years he had overseen the incredible growth of its museums and publications. Dillon was also a legendary ornithologist. He was coauthor—with Salim Ali, the birdman of India—of a massive 10-volume book, Birds of India. Dillon was almost 80 years old, and his last ambition was to produce a field guide of the birds of South Asia. He hired Pam to assist him on this project. However, soon after Pam started this job, Dillon’s health began to fail. He was seldom at work, leaving Pam without any supervision. She received some assistance from an ornithologist who had previously worked for Dillon.
Pam took on the task of completing the field guide with the same intensity she had as a child looking through Birds of the World. In a short time she had to become familiar with the 1,441 bird species found in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and the islands of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. To accomplish this, she examined thousands of bird skins at the Smithsonian, which houses the worlds largest avian collection (more than 600,000 specimens), as well as collections in New York and London. This was necessary to confirm which species would be included in the guide and where each had been seen. She corresponded and met with ornithologists from many South Asian nations, but best of all, she was able to travel in South Asia to find, photograph, and record bird species, as well as collect needed specimens. “The job seemed like it was too good to be true,” remembered Pam.
Pam pictured with bird skins at Michigan State University.
Courtesy of Pamela Rasmussen
With Dillon less and less involved in the project, Pam had to search for funding for her travels and find the time to contact government authorities about getting permits to do research. Her travel could take place during the summer while Dillon, who was from a wealthy family, vacationed at a large estate in Connecticut. Summer is monsoon season, a time of torrential rains in much of South Asia. Searching and collecting under such soggy conditions was not easy. On Pam’s first trip to the Himalayas, leeches of all sizes rained down on her from trail-side plants and latched onto whatever skin they could find. This would become a serious field hazard years later when Pam developed an allergic reaction to leeches and had to carry an EpiPen to slow the reaction until she could get medical care.
At the Smithsonian, her work was both challenging and rewarding. Pam’s careful examination of museum specimens led to her discovering and describing four new species of Asian birds: three owls and a bush warbler. However, she was soon to make an even more startling discovery. In 1996 Pam read an article by an Irish ornithologist in which he claimed that two specimens of common redpolls in the collection of ornithologist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen were fakes. Bird collectors have distinctive methods of preparing skins, and ornithologist Alan Knox had noticed that these two bird skins, which Meinertzhagen noted as coming from France, were prepared using techniques identical to redpolls prepared by another collector in Great Britain almost 70 years before the date listed on one of Meinertzhagen’s redpoll specimens. Pam was alarmed. She knew how much S. Dillon Ripley and Salim Ali had relied on Meinertzhagen’s collection for research. Pam decided to investigate.
“I thought to myself, if he went to the trouble to steal and change the data on a common bird like a redpoll, wouldn’t he also try to fake some of the rarer birds?” Pam Rasmussen recounted later to a journalist.
Pam flew to Great Britain to work with Robert Pry-Jones, head of the British Natural History Museum’s bird group. Pam hoped Alan was wrong, but she and Robert soon uncovered a massive fraud. Meinertzhagen had not only collected an extraordinary number of bird specimens, he had also stolen many specimens from collections made by other scientists. He then relabeled them, listing himself as the collector, and invented fictitious locations and dates. In the case of one bird, the forest owlet, the false labeling had prevented Dillon and other ornithologists from finding it in the wild. Because Meinertzhagen sometimes tinkered with the stolen specimens to hide the style of the original maker, Pam decided to investigate further. The forest owlet had not been seen since 1914, when Meinertzhagen had supposedly collected it. With help from colleagues and the FBI lab, she proved the specimen in the Meinertzhagen collection had materials identical to the forest owlet skins collected by James Davidson in 1884. Now Pam knew where to find the missing owlet. The actual collection site was about 300 miles from where Meinertzhagen had falsely claimed he had collected it. In 1997 she went on an expedition with Ben King of the American Museum of Natural History to the site where Davidson had collected his owlets in 1884. To their dismay they found that most of the forest had been logged. On their last day of searching, they were about to give up, thinking the owlet must now be extinct. Suddenly King sighted a small owl up in a tree, and Pam confirmed that it was indeed a forest owlet.
“You can imagine the thrill when we realized what we were seeing! But my first thought would be better described as terror, because [at] any moment I fully expected the bird to fly off,” Pam said in an interview. Fortunately, it perched long enough for Pam to record the sighting on video.
Pam recording bird vocalizations in India.
Nikhil Devasar
In 1997 Pam, John Rappole of the National Geographic Society, and German ornithologist Swen Renner became some of the first Western scientists allowed to visit Myanmar (previously known as Burma), a country that had been ruled for years by a brutal military dictatorship. Pam later returned to Myanmar for more expeditions to collect data on the effects of climate change and to census the bird species of this little-known region. On the first trip her seemingly romantic transport on an elephant was so bouncy that she found it was more pleasant and just as fast to walk. On the second trip her gear ended up in the wrong location, a zone that the army had barred to foreign visitors. She and her Burmese colleagues had to sneak in, grab the gear, and then quickly travel to their study site. Pam’s 2006 expedition with John Rappole and Burmese conservationist Thein Aung was during the monsoon season in June and July, when birds are nesting. By capturing birds in special nets called mist nets and conducting both visual and auditory surveys, they confirmed the presence of 137 species, some previously unknown in the area.
In 2005, after almost 15 years of work, Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide was finally published—but to Pam it seemed her work had only begun. Her keen attention to detail and her vast knowledge of the birds of South Asia enabled her to confirm discoveries of new birds. Two of these were new Philippine owl species whose songs she recorded in 2012.
“When we first heard the songs, we were amazed because they were so distinctly different that we realized they were new species,” Pam later reported. These recordings, produced by Pam and other ornithologists, became available to the public through one of her most ambitious projects—AVoCet (Avian Vocalizations Center). Pam started this project with the hope that one day it would contain recordings of all the Earth’s bird species.
Being a major force in discovering what bird species exist on the planet and working to protect them takes persistence and dedication. Pam is grateful to have a supportive husband, paleo-biologist Michael Gottfried, as well as students and other scientists to collaborate with. Her life as an ornithologist, museum curator, and professor is busy and incredibly rewarding. For Pamela Rasmussen, who dreamed of a life spent learning about birds, it couldn’t be much better. Each year there are new birds to see and record, new questions to pursue, and new discoveries to make.
