W.E. Clyde Todd (1875-1969)

Abstract

... Since the age of fifteen Clyde Todd gave his life to the field of ornithology, a vocation he had chosen at even an earlier age as a small boy in a rural community of Western Pennsylvania. ... In 1899 his association with the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh began - one which lasted seventy years until his death in June 1969. Although retired in 1945 as Curator of Ornithology, Mr. Todd continued to work at the Museum, writing, studying, and classifying its vast collection of birds and their eggs. ... Although his study of birds in Western Pennsylvania occupied much of his life and led to the publication of his second outstanding work, The Birds of Western Pennsylvania, in 1940, it was the subarctic regions of eastern Canada to which he turned repeatedly and with ever increasing enthusiasm and interest. Carnegie Museum, over a period of nearly sixty years, sent twenty-five expeditions to the Labrador Peninsula and northeastern Ontario, on twenty of which Mr. Todd was a participant. The journeys were made, as he enjoyed saying, "the hard way" - that is, by canoe, sailing sloop, by sled, or afoot. The purpose of the many trips in which he participated, and others which he directed, was to map the range of birds in that vast area and to ascertain the character and extent of their natural life zones. The result of his observations and collections culminated in 1963 in the publication of his monumental work, The Birds of the Labrador Peninsula and Adjacent Areas, published by the University of Toronto Press in cooperation with Carnegie Museum, and with the generous help of grants from Mrs. Alan M. Scaife and Edward O'Neil, both of Pittsburgh. It was hailed as the finest bird book ever produced in Canada. More than eight hundred pages in length, this volume is descriptive of over three hundred species, illustrated with many photographs taken on various expeditions and with magnificent colour plates by Dr. George M. Sutton, who accompanied Mr. Todd on several of his journeys. ... Space does not permit a detailed account of Mr. Todd's many expeditions to Labrador and the northern parts of Ontario, each of which is well described in his book, but some deserve particular mention. Accompanied by Olaus J. Murie as his assistant, one other white man, and three Indian guides, Todd in 1917 traversed the Labrador Peninsula from Seven Islands to Fort Chimo, a three months' canoe trip through virtually unknown country. In 1926, accompanied by Dr. Sutton and John B. Semple, a Trustee of Carnegie Museum, a bird collecting expedition covered the East Coast of James and Hudson Bay, as far north as Cape Wolstenholme, a three months' trip. In 1939 Mr. Todd, then in his mid-sixties, and accompanied by Dr. J. Kenneth Doutt, Mammalogist of Carnegie Museum, and Mrs. Doutt as botanist, made the long journey up the Hamilton River to the Grand Falls (now Churchill Falls) of Labrador and beyond. Six years later at the age of seventy, Mr. Todd and Dr. Doutt, on a trip lasting from winter into the summer months, visited the northeast shore of Hudson Bay and attempted a traverse across the country, to be turned back, however, because of adverse weather conditions. Probably no other man knew the Labrador Peninsula as well as did he, not only its birds but in an understanding of the relationship of nature to man in that large and often desolate land which he loved so well, and to which he always referred as the "North Country". ... His contributions toward knowledge of the Labrador Peninsula and other areas of his beloved North Country have enriched us all.