JOSEPH HICKEY WOULD PROBABLY SCOFF AT THE NOTION, but his life seemed to be marked by synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences.
Hickey the scientist would say there’s no proof these coincidences had meaning. But still they existed for this man of so many loves: of family and science and birds and teaching and song.
There was the Bronx County Bird Club, the spirited but serious group of teens prowling the Bronx and beyond for notable bird species, including the herring gull, which would have a part in the DDT battles. Its members included Allan Cruickshank and Hickey, and latecomer to the group, Roger Tory Peterson. Some would say they were chasing birds. History would show that several were chasing their passions and careers.
There was the American Museum of Natural History, where the teenagers were challenged by a young but authoritative German ornithologist and environmental biologist, Ernst Mayr. Through Mayr, they met men like Konrad Lorenz, the renowned and multitalented German scholar who pioneered ethology, the study of animal behavior.
As a young man trying to make his living during the Great Depression, Hickey would fortify himself with birding in the 1930s, especially the development of a list of peregrine falcon aeries, or nests—275 in all—across eastern North America. These nesting sites would play a pivotal role in the DDT battles decades later. He published the findings in 1942, likely satisfied that his work would provide a baseline for future population biology studies but not anticipating it would be fodder for an environmental debate. Two decades later, as evidence built indicating the peregrine falcon population decline, he would arrange for a resurvey of the sites. Finding them empty set him in motion to figure out why.
A chance meeting with Aldo Leopold at a cocktail party at the Yale Club in New York City in 1940 would lead to an invitation from Leopold to join him for a research project in Wisconsin and earn a master’s degree to boot. He did so, working on a study of potential wildlife habitat on submarginal farmland in southwestern Wisconsin.1 Hickey would move on to Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland. The work done by researchers there would also have an impact on later DDT battles.
Leopold would call on Hickey again in 1947, inviting him to become his first assistant in the Department of Wildlife Management at Madison. Hickey accepted. Leopold would die a year later, but his legacy at Madison would help foster an enhanced ecological understanding of the world that would be embraced by talented young scientists, including botanists Orie Loucks and Hugh Iltis. Some of the young turks were more willing to jump into the public arena and nudged the older and more reserved Hickey.
Indeed, the life of Joseph Hickey would involve other moments when the stars seemed to line up. But Professor Joseph J. Hickey was a scientist first, and nothing about his evolution into a citizen scientist was coincidental. He plotted his steps one at a time, one careful move after the next, the latter building on the former.
Born in New York City in 1907, Hickey’s lifelong interest in birds was first ignited by a scoutmaster, Reverend Basil Hall. That led him to the Bronx County Bird Club. How a group of nine teenagers who held a common passion for birding found each other was the stuff of synchronicity, too. In any case, there they were, the BCBC, a group of young bird-watchers remarkable for what they would accomplish in life.
Years later, Hickey and Roger Tory Peterson would reflect on their BCBC days. Early on, they encountered Ludlow Griscom, author of Birds of the New York City Region, who pushed them to build their bird lists. When Ernst Mayr took a position at the American Museum of Natural History, “He wanted to learn something about American birds,” Hickey recalled.2 “The best way to know American birds was to pal around with the Bronx County Bird Club.” Peterson added, “He quickly got educated, and then he educated us. And he said, ‘Every-body’s got to have a problem.’” Hickey recalled, “We laughed at first,” but the concept of having a problem to be worked on systematically and thoroughly would stick with him for life, whether pioneering studies of bird mortality rates or chasing down the mystery of DDT.
Fame struck early for Peterson. His A Field Guide to the Birds was published in 1934, making bird-watching accessible to the masses by concentrating on quick identification focused on field marks. He was in his mid-twenties. “I’m often given the credit for this great explosion [in birding], but simply because I was an artist to put it all down. I couldn’t have written my field guide without the BCBC and Griscom.”3
Peterson’s would be a more direct career path than his pal Hickey, whose early adulthood included earning a bachelor’s degree in history from New York University, where he was also a track champion mile runner. Upon graduating during the Great Depression, Hickey took jobs as a track coach at NYU and businessman at Consolidated Edison. But he didn’t abandon birding. Mayr encouraged Hickey to obtain scientific training and turn his hobby into a professional career, and Hickey responded by heading off to night school, where he pursued undergraduate studies in biology.
Then came the encounter with Leopold and the invitation to introduce himself to Wisconsin and graduate work in wildlife management at the university in Madison. Leopold’s protégé soon proved worthy. Noting that there was no American equivalent for the British book The Art of Bird-Watching, by E. M. Nicholson, Hickey chose to fill that niche as his master’s thesis. He undertook work on what would become a classic in its own right. “A Guide to Bird Watching” was submitted as his master’s thesis and published immediately, in 1943, by Oxford University Press. It endures on library shelves today by reason of its distinctive focus. In it, Hickey encouraged going beyond finding and identifying birds to truly studying them and their lives. In the preface Hickey noted he was writing for both the novice and the veteran.
Hickey then earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan, where his dissertation, “Survival Studies of Banded Birds,” uncovered a gold mine of unexploited bird banding data accumulated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The dissertation was later published in 1952. Hickey’s two publications and the science behind them would have been a career’s worth of accomplishment, and they had already earned him recognition as a top-notch ecologist and ornithologist. But other tasks awaited Hickey.
While working at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in 1947, Hickey accepted Leopold’s invitation to join him as second professor in the Department of Wildlife Management. Leopold’s letter of January 8 noted, “I am writing at this early date in order to anticipate offers from elsewhere. I am hoping you may wind up your present undertaking by January 1, 1948.”4
Hickey went about his work in Madison with vigor, satisfied in his role as a scientist, not a conservationist. But within a decade, evidence of a pending disaster would begin to emerge. “I picked up rumors of DDT affecting songbird populations in something called the Bulletin of the Illinois Audubon Society . . . and here were people in Winnetka and suburbs of the city [of Chicago] reporting wholesale die-offs of robins,” Hickey recalled.5 “Now, no scientist had ever looked at these things,” he added.
His experience at the funeral in Kenilworth, where he noted an absence of robins from a mulberry tree, got under his skin. “I really wasn’t connecting DDT with anything like this,” Hickey recalled. He asked the minister about the robins and was told, “They were here in the spring, but I think they all went north.” Hickey remembered thinking, “That almost sounds like the passenger pigeon stories that you heard.”6
Hickey went back to Madison to try to determine if the rumors were fact. The year was 1958. That produced his earliest research on DDT, which led to his tearful encounter with Gene Roark.
Hickey began laboratory work in autumn 1958. Years later, he recalled: “And so we captured robins and we fed them DDT. It was a horrible experiment. But we did find out that DDT was quite lethal, particularly with respect to methoxychlor—another pesticide used to control Dutch elm disease—which in one case might have made the robin sick, but it did not die.”7
With the help of students, he followed up in spring 1959 with a census of two twenty-five-acre plots in three communities that did not spray DDT and the same number of plots in three communities that had been sprayed. “In the wealthier communities, where they’d been spraying quite a while, everything was way down. Silent Spring was there: let’s say 90 percent of the whole bird population was wiped out.”8 That same spring, the Madison campus was sprayed with DDT, as was the upscale village of Maple Bluff nearby. Of the latter, Hickey recalled, “Everything was dying over there, and those women were calling me up.”
In fact, Hickey liked to say it was women who got him going on his DDT research. There was Rachel Carson, of course, but also the suburban housewives who kept calling him and sending dead birds they found when their communities were sprayed in the 1950s and 1960s. “The suburbs of our big cities—Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison—these are populated mostly by college graduates, and this is one of the best-educated groups of women in the world,” he recalled in a 1982 magazine article. “When they began to report that these birds had died, the scientific community paid no attention to them.”9
Hickey had also been cautious about stepping out too far. But Hickey the scientist activist was emerging as the 1960s approached.
In addition to his other research in 1959, Hickey and some of his students did a careful survey on campus that spring and estimated that 86 to 88 percent of the campus robins had died. Yellow warblers were wiped out, as was the only pair of screech owls on campus.
The mystery of DDT was only just emerging. Research was showing DDT’s connection to the lethal effects on songbirds, but, as Hickey recalled, “We had no idea of the insidious effect of DDT in a sub-lethal sense.”10 Hickey would encounter pressure to keep what he knew under his hat. He was in the College of Agriculture, where DDT use was being recommended for use in the battle against insect pests, whether in agricultural fields or stately elm trees.
Attending the 1962 International Ornithological Conference at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Hickey heard something new. “I picked up the rumor that not a single peregrine falcon in the northeastern part of the United States had raised any young that year. I picked this up as a rumor, and I didn’t necessarily believe it,” he recalled.11
The peregrine falcon was known as a resilient member of the land community, despite the fact that the birds had some strikes against them: they were often sought after by falconers; their hunting skills led them into the crosshairs of pigeon racers who saw them as foes; collectors prized their eggs. Despite these pressures, records from Europe indicated that some aeries had been in use continuously for centuries, and nesting histories in the United States date back to the mid-1800s.12 Challenges of life among humans aside, peregrines were cosmopolitan in their nesting and eating habits, and their population stability was built on that.
“Ah, but the following June my copy of Bird Study [The Journal of the British Trust for Ornithology] came in, I think it was Bird Study, and there was Derek Ratcliffe’s report of the decline of the peregrine falcon in Britain and I thought, my God, this may be going right on in the United States and we are not even aware of it!”13 Ratcliffe was chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy Council.
Hickey immediately recognized what he must do. “I had a personal responsibility to run this down right away. This was my job! It was something I couldn’t duck.”
And the BCBC helped him. Among his earliest friends, going back to second grade, was Dick Herbert, a charter member of the club of youthful birders. A few years after Herbert’s death, one more contribution to the cause would be made on his behalf. Hickey explained: “I organized a research project which my good friend, Kathleen Herbert, financed as a memorial to her late husband, Dick, who was one of my oldest and best friends. We put two men to work to census the peregrine falcons that I had mapped in the 1930s.”14
Research assistants Dan Berger and Charles Sindelar had been sent off for the eastern United States and Canada in 1964. Hickey asked them to seek out aeries in wilderness areas when possible. “They covered 14,000 miles looking at peregrine falcons at the time they would have young in the nests, but they did not see a single bird! They found some whitewash on one [aerie], indicating recent occupancy.” Berger and Sindelar traveled from Georgia to Nova Scotia, reaching 133 known nesting sites, some that had been occupied for a hundred years.
Hickey, meanwhile, was doing some of his own investigative work. On a seven-month swing through Europe, he interviewed colleagues in Finland, Switzerland, France, England, and Germany, learning that their peregrine falcon populations had also plummeted.
“This looked like something that had happened on two continents,” he recalled. “It therefore seemed absolutely imperative that we call an international symposium to bring all these population stories into focus and plan the research that was needed to explain exactly what was taking place,” he told the National Audubon Society years later, when he was honored with the Audubon Medal.15
But the conference needed funding. “I did get immediate encouragement from the U.S. Public Health Service, but the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Interior turned me down cold. It was at this point, when I was becoming very discouraged, that Audubon’s President [Carl William] Buchheister phoned me, right out of the blue, to say that his Board of Directors had just voted me some $8,500 to help make the Madison international peregrine conference a reality. I never had communicated with Audubon about such a symposium, and I never did learn how they reached a figure like $8,500.”16
Again, the BCBC was with him. “I was told that the whole idea was the brainchild of board member Roger Tory Peterson. It seems to be absolutely certain that this [grant from Audubon to support the conference] was the critical decision that brought scientists and naturalists together from seven countries and led to the extraordinary discovery that on two continents parent peregrine falcons were breaking and eating their own eggs.”
In 1965, with the help of the National Institutes of Health, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, the American Museum of Natural History, and the National Audubon Society, Hickey held the peregrine falcon conference in Madison. “We brought people in from Europe and from Africa, our own colleagues and institutions around the United States and Canada, and had about 50 people. We tried to discuss what research we needed to find out what was going on.
“Well, the British had done their homework, and when they came, it was a magnificent meeting. They came with their facts, and their facts were that the peregrine falcon population crash in Britain was due to a reproductive failure and this reproductive failure was due to the fact that the birds were eating their own eggs. And, wow, did that hit us like a bombshell, because nobody in this country had ever suspected this thing. . . . But the British at this meeting convinced us that we were dealing with broken egg shells and this peculiar behavior.”17
The conference was loaded with accomplished ornithologists and ecological scientists. Ratcliffe was there, as were husband and wife William and Lucille Stickel of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Hickey’s old friend Peterson was on hand, as were Wisconsin researchers and Citizens Natural Resource Association members Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom, who were making names for themselves with research on raptors and prairie chickens in central Wisconsin. Frances Hamerstrom presented “A Harrier Population Study in Central Wisconsin,” in which she told of steep declines in the number of migrating harriers through the area from 1960 to 1965. Nests had decreased 84 percent from a high of twenty-five in 1963 to four in 1965. “The cause of the harrier decline is unknown, but there is suggestive evidence that pesticides, acting through the avian component of the harrier’s diet, may be involved,” she speculated.18
Hickey’s conference proceedings capture understandable scientific reticence from William Stickel. Allowing that pesticides might have a role in bird declines, he said, “There is also a tendency, now a habit, to blame pesticides for all avian declines, even where evidence does not support the belief.”19 Many other factors, including disease and depredation might be at work, he said. Through their research at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, William and Lucille Stickel would both end up making major contributions to the study of the influence of pesticides and other contaminants on wildlife. Lucille Stickel’s work on eggshell thinning—brought on by dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), a breakdown product of DDT—would be a major contribution to the body of knowledge and would engage Hickey in another key research effort.
When the conference concluded, Hickey had the task of summarizing the findings. “Then, this was a long process of translating the spoken English at this conference into the written English which are two different languages,” he later recalled. “It was an experience that I had never had before and never hope to have again.”20
Hickey labored over the work. Four years later the nearly six-hundred-page Peregrine Falcon Populations: Their Biology and Decline [Proceedings of an International Conference Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, 1965] was published in 1969. James E. Roelle, a colleague in the Department of Wildlife Ecology, assisted him in the effort.
In its conclusion, Hickey wrote that a new life history phenomenon had emerged. The ability to mobilize large amounts of calcium for production of eggs “has long been an evolutionary triumph of [birds].” But DDT and its metabolites had caused “a failure to lay eggs (or eggs that would persist), decreased numbers of eggs, egg breakage and egg-eating, inability to re-nest and decreased viability of their young.
“The ecological case against the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides as the pervasive factor in these phenomena is essentially complete.”
As though to anticipate criticism, he added, “There is no doubt that these compounds have been of enormous benefit to mankind. But they are persisting chemicals, and they tend to be progressively concentrated in wild animals at the tops of certain food webs and ecosystems.”21
The peregrine falcon wasn’t alone. Also affected, Hickey concluded, were Scottish golden eagles, sparrow hawks, American ospreys, and bald eagles, all victims of “a new process of physiological deterioration. Many other species are almost certainly involved—and in regions far from the original ports of environmental contamination.”
The findings were stunning. But perhaps as important, the conference had served to bring together researchers who looked at scientific problems from an ecological perspective. Work on pesticides had, until DDT, been primarily limited to research by economic entomologists who toiled for industry or universities, and a few chemical-friendly agencies of the federal government.
Joseph Hickey’s transformation was complete. He was, after all, a scientist who had believed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a book “full of truths, half-truths and untruths.”22 The same year in which he published the proceedings, 1969, Hickey was already deeply engaged in efforts to call DDT on the carpet in the DNR’s administrative hearing. He was no longer just a scientist; he had become a citizen activist.
Hickey and other citizen scientists were laying the groundwork for assessing human actions based on their impacts on other members of the land community. Aldo Leopold, who had laid out these interwoven relationships in A Sand County Almanac, would have been proud.
But Hickey and others would run into powerful opposition.
Despite his early concerns about DDT’s impacts, Hickey was an unlikely protagonist in this public-policy debate.
Hickey put it this way: “And one of the dilemmas of the time was that as much as one wanted to be a conservationist, it was impossible for a research worker to come out against DDT because we didn’t have the research and if you were conducting research in this field, you were then conducting research to prove that you were right, and that is something you cannot do. So, my wife Peggy would say, Joe, why can’t you come out against DDT the way Roger Peterson is. Well I would say Peggy, Roger Peterson isn’t conducting research. My contribution is to test hypotheses and one hypothesis is that DDT may be causing this thing but I cannot afford to . . . make a flat statement and then try to prove I am right.”23
Hickey also had doubts about whether scientists should engage in messy public debates, where decisions aren’t made on the basis of science alone. But the Madison peregrine conference had thrust him onto a new trajectory.
Still, he needed science to back him up. “Finally, I sent Ratcliffe 10 hypotheses having to do with why the birds were breaking and eating their own eggs. And two of the 10 hypotheses included the possibility that the eggshells had become thinner, and at this point he wrote me and he said, ‘Yes, it is an eggshell change, and I have been testing this for about three months,’ and he had been going to private egg collections in Britain and finding that the eggshells there were thinner than those in the museums. And so he broke this story to me in February, and I immediately . . . had to write him and say, ‘Can I make this public?’”24 Hickey was asking permission to share the information with other ornithologists and ecologists, the Stickels among them.
Events were coalescing. Hickey was soon to enter the public arena. But before he did so, he needed some hard data on eggshell thinning in North America. He turned to Dan Anderson, the graduate student who had worked with him on herring gull response to chemicals in Lake Michigan.