milton friend 2

A Half Century in Wildlife Biology

Milton Friend, con’t

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A couple of anecdotes of how things have changed: In Zoology, which I didn’t have a whole lot of feeling for then, one of the species to be dealt with was the lobster. The professor said, “We have two choices: I have this big basket of lobsters, one for each of you. We can each take apart a lobster and learn the anatomy. Or I can take one lobster apart and teach you the anatomy and we can eat the rest of them.” And we actually boiled and ate – that was first lobster I had eaten – in class! Would you do something like that today? No way!

And on the opening day of hunting season, the class would meet with guns in the woods. It was about appreciating the hunt and the culture and a lot of other things. Smelling the autumn woods.

Some classes I didn’t see the value for back then. The most ridiculous thing to me was memorizing endless scientific names and their spellings. If you want to know the scientific name of something, look it up in a taxonomy book. You don’t need to clutter your brain. But it was the way it was, the way things were taught then. I can still remember Harry Everhart in Ichthyology and Fish Management and these endless jars of pickled fish in the lab. For tests, you’d get one point for identifying the fish, one point for spelling the genus right, and one point for spelling the species right. You could know every fish and spell them wrong and flunk the test. Which was absurd to me. The things that were really important were knowing what the species was and knowing its life history and how to manage it.

And now we’re in the world of molecular techniques so the species aren’t the species you thought they were, so the taxonomy had changed, and will continue to change.

WILDLIFE DISEASE
I took every course that I could take, that there was an hour for. So that meant to 20 to 23 semester hours per semester. One of the courses I took was a lecture lab in wildlife disease taught by J. Franklin Witter, who was a veterinarian. Again, we remained friends until he died. Even when I was director here, we were writing letters back and forth.
Frank Witter had the contract with Maine Dept. of Fish & Game, so dead critters would end up with him to determine what they died of. All the spare time I had was spent going over there to do post mortems. As we became upper classmen, we lived in little suites. I had a roommate from Pakistan who was a Pulp & Paper major – a five-year undergraduate course, a big program. He finally figured out that I was too weird because in the wintertime I used to bring carcasses home and store them between the screen and the window so they’d stay cold. Then I’d bring them in the room so I could cut them up. He finally asked permission to room with someone else. We stayed as friends, though. Every one of these animals was a detective story. It was a puzzle and a challenge to try to understand what was going on. In those days – the early 1950s – what were we talking about in terms of wildlife disease? Well, it was avian botulism. It was lead poisoning. And that was about it in terms of major diseases. There was the usual spectrum of parasites that you had to learn to identify because they were there. Leucocytozoen was something of concern – it’s a blood protozoan transmitted by black flies. But none of these were causing any major problems. Yet this was also a period in which wildlife populations -- a lot of them -- weren’t doing very well, especially waterfowl. It was due to habitat change and land clearing and over-harvesting by previous generations. Wood ducks had been slaughtered everywhere. They’re easy prey - and they were almost ready to be listed, believe it or not. So my first job, while I was at Maine, was as an assistant waterfowl biologist for Vermont Fish & Game on Lake Champlain, working on wood ducks. Eventually I graduated and went to work in fisheries for Massachusetts Fish & Game. And then got called into the military. THE ARMY, FLYING, SHOOTING
& BEING SAVED BY THE COLD WAR I needed the money from ROTC simply to live; 90 cents or a dollar a day was a lot of money. I also cut pulp with an axe and a cross-cut saw on weekends to make money. It was six dollar a cord – I can still remember – piled and peeled. That was a weekend’s work. I was in the first Army flight-training program. The Army finally figured out
that they needed pilots for observation and transportation and things like that – they had given them all to the Air Force. So I went to Fort Benning and I was supposed to be on my way to Fort Walton Beach to go to helicopter school. But things happen in life that you don’t have much control over and I received orders to report to a special unit that was being organized to beat the Russians in the 1960 Olympics in international shooting. The Russians were beating us at all the shooting events and, because of the Cold War, American prestige as a frontier pioneering country was at stake. I had been a college All-American at Maine. I held collegiate records. The military looked around to see where all the college All-Americans were, because college shooting was much bigger in those days than it is now. So I was pulled from flight duty and put in this special unit where money was no object. I was a free rifle shooter. Free rifle comes out of Sweden – it has these thumb-hole stocks with very fine triggers. Free rifle events – 300 meter, 100 meter and 50 meter -- were pretty rigorous. Six and a half hours for a course of fire, with a rifle that weighs about 17 pounds. It’s very precise, the most precise type of marksmanship that there is. And it’s done in three different positions: prone, kneeling, and standing. I used to lead physical training for the team. The Olympics were in Rome, but they split the team and I went to the National Championships and won a couple of those. It probably saved my life. Most of the people I went to school with were killed in Southeast Asia. But I would have stayed in the military because I loved flying. For me it became a new love. It also put me in a different part of the country to enjoy local wildlife. I can still remember Herbert Stoddard coming to Fort Benning. He was “Mr. Bobwhite Quail” of Georgia. Having the opportunity to interact with him there in a sportsmen’s group – you’d get involved in all this stuff.
So basically I didn’t have military duty. I shot. I played baseball – that was another activity down there. When I got out, it took awhile to get a job in conservation. I worked in factories and on the highway, like I’d done during the summers in college. I took a lot of exams for different places and finally ended up in New York State as an upland game research biologist for about a year.
PART III: CONSERVATION WORK & CHANGING VALUES NEW YORK STATE As things happened, the pathologist there, Jim Reilly decided to go back to school to get his Ph.D. Again, think of the time-frame: You didn’t have all these degrees after people’s names. You had a lot of practical knowledge. A lot of the wildlife work was done by people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees. So Jim went back to school and the department said, “Who’s interested in taking over the wildlife disease program?” I put up my hand and, based on my experience from the University of Maine, that had continued, ad hoc, with freelance work, I became the Wildlife Pathology leader. That’s how I met my third most important mentor, Dr. Donald J. Dean, a veterinarian. He probably had a Ph.D., although I don’t know. Dr. Dean was the director of Hygiene and Research, or whatever they called it, for the New York State Department of Health. This was a very large laboratory out in the countryside, not too far from the research station where I was stationed. I had a post mortem room and a small office, but no laboratories. It was easy to partner in those days. The silos weren’t up. The competition wasn’t up there. People in those days were very eager to work with one another and share. I was given space and access to all of the staff there. I would do my post mortems at the wildlife center, run over to the Division of Laboratories and Research and talk to microbiologists and virologists: “Would you be willing to run this for me?”

****** It was kind of a template for the National Wildlife Health Center. That’s where all of these experiences came back to roost. Very early I learned to appreciate that as “an army of one,” I can’t do very much. But there are a lot of things that we – Agriculture, Public Health, Wildlife -- have mutual interests in. They let me work on anything I wanted to, so I worked on psittacosis in birds. I worked on salmonella in those little turtles that people would by at Kresge’s and 5 & 10 stores. I learned what isolation space was all about. I learned how to work with hazardous agents and how to take care of things. I learned the value of teams of people
and bringing their expertise to bear. And most importantly, I looked at Donald Dean and he became my model for an administrator-scientist. By day he administered the programs. By night he did his research. I don’t know when he ever had time for family.

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