For the Birds

T

hat’s a cardinal,” Roger Pasquier ’69 says crisply, holding up a finger to call for attention, or as if testing the wind. The lifelong birder has interrupted himself in the midst of reflecting on his career as a conservationist and self-taught ornithologist. I look around, expecting to see the flash of red and black bandit mask that even a novice would know. Yet — we are sitting in Pasquier’s tidy study, in his second-floor apartment on the Upper East Side; the only wildlife immediately in evidence perch on painted branches in the Audubons that hang on his walls. Behind Pasquier, however, a rectangle of blue sky and leafy tree peek through a window. I realize with a start that he heard the cardinal, that some telltale whistle or chirp must have clued him in to its presence.

Pasquier’s ears are finely tuned, a crucial tool for identification in a pastime where the objects of interest are heard more often than seen; sound is what cues a birdwatcher to something happening in the foliage. “Instead of going to an audiologist, I test my hearing every spring on the birds that have the highest-pitched songs,” Pasquier says. “I also test myself against birders in their 20s, whose hearing has not been damaged by 50 additional years of living in New York City. So far, it’s intact, so that’s good.”

Unlike many devotees, Pasquier doesn’t keep a “life list” of every species he has ever seen. He brushes off the suggestion that he might; he looks for birds wherever he travels but says his total would be unremarkable, in the low thousands. What he does have, though, are more than 60 years of meticulous records of the birds he has observed on regular walks in Central Park.

Five blocks from his home, the 843-acre expanse is essentially Pasquier’s backyard. “The pleasure is just walking and seeing whatever I discover,” he says. “The great seasonal changes, of movements coming north in the spring and going south in the fall.” Indeed, while Pasquier has worn many hats in his career — working for organizations like the National Audubon Society and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF); leading a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Peruvian rainforest; and authoring multiple books on birding and bird behavior — it’s his unofficial role that might be most defining.

“He’s the Master Yoda of Central Park birding,” says Christian Cooper, the author of Better Living Through Birding, who has known Pasquier for upward of 35 years.

“Roger is a legend in Central Park birdwatching circles,” affirms David Wilcove, a former EDF colleague and a Princeton professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the status and distribution of birds that migrate through, breed or spend the winter there.”

Longtime friend Thomas Love ’72 says Pasquier also has a gift for helping people appreciate the space itself — a lesson Love received as an Idaho transplant who was feeling a bit crushed by urban life.

“We don’t remember doing anything on campus together,” he says. “It was always Central Park.”

For Pasquier, the park is an oasis that offers winged travelers a place to land amidst the vast concrete. It also makes an ideal vantage point for their earthbound admirers.

“New York City is a crossroads for birds that are naturally coming from many different parts of the world and accidentally coming from other parts,” he says. “Some are from the high Arctic; some are from deep in South America. There are vagrants from California and from Europe. To see birds that have been places that you haven’t been, or that you have been but they know better than you do — it connects you to those places. It’s wonderful.”

Pasquier grew up on the Upper East Side; on Saturdays his mother would take him across Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), where he fell in love with, progressively, dinosaurs, antelopes, butterflies — and finally, birds. He was 7. “They were something I could actually go out and see,” he says. As soon as he was allowed to spend time in the park by himself, he did. But while his interest was “tolerated” by his parents, he recalls, ornithology wasn’t seen as a viable future. At the College he pursued another passion: art history. “What I realized years later is that both of them are all about visual analysis,” he says. “That’s something that has always resonated with me.”

Columbia’s Spring ’68 protests served, for Pasquier, as less of a political awakening than an awakening to the natural world. The cancellation of classes gave him the opportunity to go to Central Park every morning through the height of spring migration, the great annual flight from more southerly wintering grounds, often in Central and South America, to northern breeding habitats. “That’s when I saw that if you want to understand what’s happening during the migration, you need to be there every day,” he says. “I vowed that year that I would do that forever.”

Forever came with a few exceptions. Pasquier spent a year at UC Berkeley to continue studying art history, but discovered his purpose lay elsewhere. “I felt that the kind of research I was doing there was more or less detective work, like closing a little pigeon hole that nobody else might ever open again.

“I thought, if I put the same energy into science — into birds and the rest of the natural world — I could be doing something that helps ensure that they continue to exist.”

It’s a point of pride for Pasquier that he built a successful career without academic training in ornithology or even broader subjects like biology or zoology. His early trajectory was focused on environmental education and museum work, including as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Ornithology at AMNH; there, he helped visiting scientists with research and took care of the collection of some 860,000 specimens. When he was 29, he published his first book, Watching Birds, an introduction to ornithology for the general reader.

Pasquier spent five years in Washington, D.C., transitioning from museum work at the Smithsonian Institution to conservation and fundraising at what today is BirdLife International. Once back in NYC, he continued his focus on generating support for environmental causes, through roles at the World Wildlife Fund-U.S., EDF and National Audubon Society.

Rainforest protection provided a through line in many of his efforts. He felt so ardently that in 1989 he co-founded a nonprofit, Friends of the Peruvian Rainforest, with a friend who introduced him to that part of Amazonia: “It showed me so intensely how complicated, elegant and fragile rainforests are, and how important — we now know — from the climate point of view.” The Friends focused largely on buying or securing land titling for large tracts of rainforest; the documentation ensured that Indigenous peoples and local farmers had legal rights to their land, and recourse in the face of loggers, miners or other threats. Pasquier estimates that the group ultimately helped save tens of millions of acres. (It ceased operation in 2000.)

Pasquier’s expertise led to a surprising turn in 1995, as a guest star in a Barbie comic. His friend Cooper, then a writer and editor for Marvel Comics, heard there was a rainforest adventure in the works and recommended a consultation with Pasquier. The Marvel writers went a step further, turning him into a character — a scientist who spies two pet smugglers looking for macaws and asks to borrow Barbie and Ken’s radio to call for help.

“It was about the illegal parrot trade,” Pasquier explains. “But there were a lot of rules with the story — it couldn’t be too violent or scary. And it was important that Barbie know everything on her own.” When I ask Cooper about it, he laughs at the memory: “He was thrilled, which is so not Roger. I think of him as going to classical music concerts, going to the latest openings and museums.” More than 30 years on, it’s clear Pasquier’s delight hasn’t faded; along with landscapes and other nature art, a framed blowup of a page from the comic hangs prominently in his living room.

Today, Pasquier is an associate in the Department of Ornithology at AMNH. He goes into the museum most days; he enjoys the camaraderie as well as the privileges of its sizable library. The latter is essential for researching his book projects. Recent works include Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season and Birds at Rest: The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep. (Two prior compendiums came out of his love of art — one features paintings of Central Park; the other chronicles 700 years of ornithological illustration.)

Pasquier loves the process. “I see writing these books as treasure hunts to get information,” he says. And he never tires of his subject. “The more you think you know, the more it opens up other fields of how much there is still to be known.

“It’s also a way to be connected to the larger world,” he adds.

“When you’re looking at birds, you’re looking at things that are millions of years old, and they’re connecting you with times past. You’re seeing millions of years of refinement; each of them does things that we couldn’t possibly do, things that are extraordinarily complicated and sophisticated.”

Pasquier says that his retirement years have been the best of his life: “All I do is write books about topics that interest me, go bird-watching and have a good time with friends.” Cooper observes that where a typical birdwatcher might focus on one spot a day, like The Ramble or the North Woods, Pasquier will start in The Ramble and “walk and walk and walk and walk, from 72nd all the way to 110th.” Or as Pasquier puts it, “I stay as long as I please.”

He plans ultimately to donate his Central Park journals to the AMNH archives; the leather-bound volumes fill multiple shelves in his study. He’s been using the same format since college, noting the time he enters and leaves the park, along with the different species and number of each that he sees. “They are quite valuable because they are already a 60-year record of what’s happened in a single place,” he says. That includes showing the effects of climate change. He notes that warmer weather has many of the park’s trees leafing out and flowering weeks earlier than in his Columbia days.

“Birds in the tropics are on a very fixed schedule; their migration is triggered by changes in day length — not the advance of spring far to the north of where they winter,” he explains. “And so now when they get here, some of the plant life and insects they depend on for food are already at a different stage. It’s all accelerating, it’s all coming sooner. And so by the time the birds get here, some of their food sources are not available.”

As our conversation winds down, I can’t help but ask: All those years of birding the park, is there one bird that he most looks forward to seeing each spring? Or that he loves the most, period?

Pasquier is diplomatic.

“There are close to 12,000 recognized species of birds,” he says. “Some of my colleagues at the museum think 20,000 is a more accurate number — not that there are 8,000 waiting to be discovered, but rather some that we consider a single species might actually be several that look very similar. So whether it’s 12,000 or 20,000, every bird has a wonderful story, every bird has interesting things about it. I can’t have a favorite.”