Migratory shorebirds lost a champion in January 2019, with the passing of Johanna Alderfer (Nan) Harris.
Nan was an enthusiastic believer in the mission of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, and a strong advocate for shorebirds during her two-decade tenure on the Manomet board (WHSRN is managed by an Executive Office that is nested within Manomet’s Shorebird Recovery Program.) But Nan had put a lot of thought into how she would keep propelling shorebird conservation forward, even once she could no longer fight for shorebirds herself. Her commitment compelled her and her husband Bill to create the Nan and Bill Harris Fund for WHSRN, which endowed support for the WHSRN Executive Office in perpetuity.
Rob Clay, the director of the WHSRN Executive Office, and Maina Handmaker, WHSRN’s Communications Specialist, recently had the privilege of speaking with Nan’s husband Bill – about Nan’s passion for birds, her determination to apply science to conservation, and her deep belief in the power of WHSRN’s mission.
Rob Clay: How did Nan first develop an interest in birding, and how did she first connect with Manomet?
Bill Harris: The origins of Nan’s interest in birding came from her father. He was a professor of local government…at Penn State University in central Pennsylvania, and a man of very broad interests that included a love of birds. Nan acquired that at an early age from him and it lasted her lifetime. When we settled in the Belmont area (a suburb of Boston), she was very busy raising four kids, and had to defer for a while a keen interest in birding. But it was rejuvenated by a woman named Nancy Claflin. Nancy was on the board of Manomet, and she had a lifelong interest in birding. Through her stimulus, Nan found out about Manomet and became intrigued by it. She was attracted initially to the birding aspect – to the mist-netting that had such a long and wonderful record at the Manomet site, but she was also intrigued by the approach of conservation science. She very much appreciated collecting data and analyzing data, and applying science to the issues of conservation – and she had a strong feeling for the innovative aspects of Manomet – as it spread, for example, into developing [fishing] nets that reduced by-catch, and as they spread into forestry…to assess questions that appeared to be age-old but unanswered, such as: what is the optimum way to recreate forest [bird habitat] after logging? So for her this was a marvelous way to approach and attack problems of conservation in nature: with a strong emphasis on birding, but with a wide emphasis on a broad range of nature’s arenas.
Photo of Nan courtesy of Bill Harris.
RC: What inspired Nan and you to create the endowment fund for WHSRN? From our perspective, it’s beyond the gold standard of support that somebody can provide to a non-profit. I really can’t emphasize enough how important it is for us. Being able to start each year with some endowment funding enables us to build a program of work in ways that I’ve never been able to do before in my professional career. It’s just a wonderful starting point each year, because it enables you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. So, I’m curious – what really inspired you to create that fund?
BH: Well, this was obviously Nan’s passion, and Nan was the driving force. The development of WHSRN had massive appeal to her… As she got deeper and deeper into WHSRN, she was more committed to the power that it can generate – and in a way that was unique. That is to say, serving as a stimulus and a catalyst, and occupying a very special role in the unification and the preservation of these extraordinary, multiple sites up and down the hemisphere. Throughout our lives we have always had an arrangement which we shared equally what we were able to donate – and she chose WHSRN. She loved to travel to the opening of new sites. We had a very memorable experience in Panama City [at the designation ceremony of the first WHSRN site in Central America: Parte Alta de la Bahía de Panamá, in 2005]. She went to a number of dedications at new sites and found those very reinforcing and extraordinarily valuable. And throughout all of this she formed very strong friendships, another important issue in both Manomet and the entire field of conservation.
Photo of Nan courtesy of Bill Harris.
RC: From all I’ve heard about Nan, it seems that she had a true natural inclination for forming those strong friendships, and understanding the importance of trusting relationships as the foundation of conservation partnerships – which really embodies the essence of WHSRN, and the connections between sites in the Network. Another thing I’ve heard about Nan is that, throughout her life, she never stopped learning, and was particularly keen to learn more about science. Can you tell us more about that?
BH: One of the fascinating things about her own individual responses to these [environmental] challenges was that she became increasingly enthralled with the importance of science, and the importance of the application of science to conservation. So, at the age of 69 she made a remarkable decision. She decided, after a lifetime of humanism (she had been an English major in college and she had emphasized art, and the history of art and archaeology), to go back and get a master’s degree in biology. And she’d only taken one course in college in science – and she did that because she had been forced to take a science course in order to be able to graduate. She had done very well in that course, it too was biology… but that was her sole exposure to science. So, at the age of 69, she was back at it. She had about a 50-year advantage on most of her contemporary students, and despite that, had more enthusiasm and more energy and more commitment than most of them. And she absolutely adored being a freshman once again. She was quite happy to do all-nighters and do the research, and master the introduction to statistics and all the rest of the things that went with it – and picked out a marvelous project for her master’s thesis.
It was no real surprise that she chose a birding project. And it was also no real surprise that this was not a busy make-work scheme, but rather had real teeth to it. The question was, on Martha’s Vineyard, how often you should burn the sand plain grasslands. Clearly burning plays an important role in the nesting of birds, and she chose a very remote bird – the Grasshopper Sparrow. The females are extraordinarily shy – you almost never see them. You rarely see the males either, but you can hear them. And so she spent five years successively quantifying the nesting experience of Grasshopper Sparrows in sand plain grasslands at Katama, a region on Martha’s Vineyard, and was able to quantify the importance of the duration after burning in terms of creating the environment for which the nesting was most appropriate. And what she found out, and this was in contrast with the widely-held beliefs of that time, was that in fact you should burn every three years – almost twice as often as the standard lore would suggest. And that information has been applied…and become an important biological input for nesting birds on Martha’s Vineyard, but also is now widely applied elsewhere in terms of grassland sand plains, in terms of when burning should be done. Thus the issue was one of great interest to her not only because of its learning but also because of the practicality of the important observations that she was able to make.
I must say, all of this was brought into sharp focus in the ceremony of her life – the celebration of her life that we had here in the Boston area in May [2019], with a banquet graced by a series of speakers reflecting on her interests, her compassion, her nobility, her contributions throughout life. And prominent in that celebration were…four different speakers dealing with her birding activities, [including] John Hagan, president of Manomet, [who] spoke on behalf of her contributions to Manomet, [and] Charles Duncan, [former director of the WHSRN Executive Office], [who] spoke specifically about her passion for WHSRN and all of her support and activities with WHSRN.
So I think that gives you a bird’s-eye view, no pun intended, of Nan’s passion – which was reinforced, certainly weekly and often times daily, by simply walking out the back door and savoring the extraordinary, reinforcing experience of birding.
Photo of Nan courtesy of Bill Harris.
RC: That was, as you say, a wonderful bird’s eye view of Nan’s passion, and commitment. I do have a question, though, because I believe Nan was the birder in the family. Did she never get you to be interested in birds?
BH: Well you know, one of the majesties of our lives was that we were extraordinarily close and yet each had strong and compelling commitments independent of that. I was a hip surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and did a lot of important things that now exist around the world in hip surgery. I was very compelled by that and committed to it and loved it – so my energies were in that direction. My joy of birding, was, to watch her.
Photo of Nan courtesy of Bill Harris.
RC: I don’t need to tell you that she sounds like a truly remarkable person, and someone I would have loved to have met. Her vision to create the Nan and Bill Harris Fund for WHSRN has had a tremendous impact for shorebird conservation. It really is thanks to the endowment that we’ve been able to grow WHSRN over the past few years. It’s enabled us to add a significant number of new sites to the Nework – we’re now at 106 sites in 17 countries. It’s enabled us to grow the Executive Office staff significantly as well. We now have eight staff that are able to support activities across the Network. It’s just a key catalytic support that enables us to cover things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.
BH: Wonderful.
Maina Handmaker: Bill, as a WHSRN staff member, I just wanted to ask: what do you think Nan would have wanted to pass on to the current WHSRN team, and to WHSRN site partners, about her hopes for the future of the Network?
BH: Well, you know her. The gestalt of Nan would be encouragement, support, best wishes, and reinforced enthusiasm. She was always such a positive person, and so forward-looking, that her message would be, “more and better.” Keep banging away and make it happen – because it’s essential.
The WHSRN Executive Office would like to thank Bill Harris for sharing his time and wonderful stories about Nan during this interview. And on behalf of WHSRN and the entire team of Manomet’s Shorebird Recovery Program, we would like to express our infinite gratitude to Nan – for setting an inspiring example of working tirelessly, and enthusiastically, for conservation, and for creating the endowment fund that helps make WHSRN’s work possible.
Cover Photo: A flock of Hudsonian Godwits and Red Knots flying at the southernmost WHSRN site, Costa Atlántica de Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Photo: Brad Winn.
