July 23, 2010 | J.B. Smith Tribune-Herald staff writer |
Anyone charting the migratory patterns of Fred Gehlbach will cover a lot of ground.
Gehlbach has often been sighted hiking in the jungles of Belize and the desolate wilds of Arizona, climbing ladders and peering into bird nests.
But the Baylor University wildlife biologist is best studied in his native habitat: the Sugar Creek subdivision in Woodway.
That’s the laboratory where the naturalist has been studying owls and other critters for more than three decades, documenting how they have adapted to suburban growth.
Along the way, he has become one of the world’s leading authorities on screech owls, traversed the Americas and written books and articles in several fields of biology.
Gehlbach turned 75 this month, but he’s building on his accomplishments instead of resting on them.
He continues to publish articles and follow bird migrations to Central America. He studies owl colonies in Arizona for the National Geographic Society.
He has contributed his owl research to a project mapping the DNA of birds worldwide.
That project has led him to his next adventure: canoeing on the Amazon River in October to study a strange, dinosaurlike bird called the hoatzin.
But Gehlbach said some of his most important research subjects are the owls that live in his own backyard and those of his suburban neighbors.
He has scattered 20 owl boxes around Woodway and West Waco and checks them regularly, sometimes taking birds out to observe and band them.
Sometimes he even takes baby owls out, perches them on a stick and passes them around to visiting schoolchildren.
He’s been studying the same owl colony in Woodway since the mid-1960s, and the birds have come to accept him.
“They know me and my footsteps,” he said. “They know the sound of my car.”
But they sometimes remind him they’re still wild birds. Not long ago, he was climbing a ladder — hatless, against his wife’s advice — to peer into an owl box.
“Both adults went after me,” Gehlbach said.
The birds took turns attacking his balding head with their talons while he scurried down the ladder. He had to get stitches for 18 scratches on his head.
“That’s why Nancy forbids me to climb ladders higher than 40 feet,” Gehlbach said, referring to his wife and research partner of 50 years.
In his study of the owl colony, he has learned facts both practical and odd.
He found that screech owls sometimes bring a blind snake the size of an earthworm to the nest to eat ants and other scavengers that might compete for the chicks’ food.
He found the nesting period for screech owls over the decade has steadily moved earlier in the month of March, which he attributes to climate change.
Urban sprawl
When Gehlbach began studying Woodway owls as a junior biology professor in 1964, the area was mostly ranch land, with heavily wooded ravines, including Sugar Creek.
He and his family moved to the Sugar Creek subdivision in 1980 so they could live near the ravine, which could not be developed.
Gehlbach headed a home-owner association effort to create a 15-acre wildlife preserve along the ravine.
Today, Fred and Nancy Gehlbach monitor the neighborhood habitat religiously. On a recent weekday morning at 7 a.m., they were checking on the nests of Mississippi kites, hawks that have taken up residence in the large live oaks in the neighborhood.
A kite swooped down from a treetop and did an acrobatic dance as it snatched dragonflies out of the air.
A jogger stopped and marveled as the Gehlbachs explained what she was watching.
Gehlbach’s studies go well beyond birds.
He has published research on fish, plants and fossils, and he is preparing to publish a study of how amphibians and reptiles have adapted to Woodway.
His wide-ranging research interests make Gehlbach something of a rare bird himself in the world of biology, which has become increasingly specialized.
Cliff Shackelford, ornithologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said Texas is “honored” to claim one the world’s leading owl experts.
He said Gehlbach’s book, “Mountain Islands and Desert Seas: A Natural History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands,” is one of his favorites, and he recommends it to parks employees who are moving to the Big Bend area.
“He’s done it all,” Shack-leford said. “A guy like that realizes that everything is intertwined. You’re studying a screech owl, then you start studying what they’re eating, and you’ve got to read about rodents and insects, and you study the composition of the forest. He has a view of the whole system.”
Walter Holmes, a Baylor botanist, calls Gehlbach a “storehouse of knowledge” who is driven by a love of nature.
Officials at the Lake Waco Wetlands and Cameron Park Zoo keep Gehlbach’s number handy for consulting on birds, plants and animals.
Zoo curator Johnny Binder said Gehlbach consulted on the creation of the Brazos River Country exhibit of Texas flora and fauna, and wetlands director Nora Schell said Gehlbach holds public education events there.
Wealth of knowledge
It’s easy to get him going. Show interest in nature, and Gehlbach can free-associate through a dizzying range of topics.
Did you know that frogs are declining because of pesticides washing into the creeks? Did you know those brown Mediterranean geckos you see around guard lights at night came to Waco with a shipment of construction material for Baylor stadium in the 1950s?
Gehlbach’s love of nature stems from his boyhood in Ohio, where he collected snakes and lizards almost obsessively.
One day, on the way to baseball practice, the 12-year-old Gehlbach spotted a row of baby owls in a tree. He took his ball and knocked them down, one by one, so he could study them up close. Satisfied, he perched them on a branch and went on his way.
As a teenager in the late 1940s, he played quarterback on his high school football team, but his real passion was the emerging field of ecology.
“By the time I was in high school, I was interested in learning more about the relationships between things,” he said. “I was interested in who ate whom, who built a nest and who used it.”
He went to Cornell University to study zoology and geology, and on to the University of Michigan for his doctorate.
He also served in the Navy aboard a destroyer in the Atlantic Ocean.
While docked in Veracruz, Mexico, he got permission to go into the jungle and record bird calls on a reel-to-reel tape player. There, he contracted malaria, which brought a medical discharge and stuck with him for seven years.
He met his wife-to-be while in graduate school in Michigan. Their first date involved wading in a pond hunting salamanders. He knew he had found a kindred spirit. Nancy Gehlbach earned her master’s degree in zoology at a time when that was rare for women.
The couple moved to Waco in 1963, and Fred Gehlbach knew it was home.
Though Baylor’s biology department was small, he would be part of its growth and development.
One day in the mid-1960s, he was in the middle of a general biology lecture when he received an urgent summons from then-Baylor President Abner McCall. He canceled class and walked to McCall’s office at Pat Neff Hall.
“McCall didn’t even greet me,” Gehlbach said. “He was on the phone and kept his phone in his hand and said, ‘Gehlbach, is it true you teach evolution?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ He said, ‘Do you require your students to believe in evolution?’ I said, ‘No, I teach it because it’s the prevailing concept in biology, and as educated people, students need to know about it.’
“We were on speakerphone, and he said, ‘You hear that, Criswell? OK, if she doesn’t like his class, she can leave.’ And he hung up on W.A. Criswell.”
Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas and a leading 20th-century fundamentalist, had received a complaint from a parishioner that evolution was taught at Baylor, Gehlbach said.
He later learned that Baylor President Pat Neff had signed off on the teaching of evolution a couple of decades before.
Wealth of knowledge
Gehlbach, a member of Lake Shore Baptist Church, said he sees no conflict between Christian faith and evolution.
He classes anti-evolutionists with climate change doubters, saying both reject clear scientific evidence.
In 1970, the Gehlbachs hit the road. Fred Gehlbach won a Guggenheim fellowship to retrace the steps of 19th-century surveyors who had left detailed descriptions of the natural world along the U.S.-Mexican border, then to document how the borderlands have changed.
The resulting book was “Desert Islands and Inland Seas.”
During one year, the Gehlbachs traveled from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. The Gehlbachs’ children, then ages 3 and 5, were part of the adventure.
“We basically lived in a VW camper about a year,” Gehlbach said. “We did the whole border, 100 miles of either side of the political border.”
Gehlbach said their grown children, Gretchen and Mark, have inherited the love of the outdoor adventure, though they have indoor jobs.
Gehlbach retired from teaching at Baylor in 1995 but was reappointed as research professor, publishing articles and mentoring graduate students.
He hopes his work will contribute to the public’s understanding of the natural world and how humans affect it through habitat loss, global warming and pollution.
“It’s all one system,” he said. “We are living in a one-world circle of life, but we are endangering it big-time.”