A native of rural North Dakota, Johnsgard grew up watching
ducks, geese, and swans in prairie potholes. He started drawing
birds almost before he can remember, and still revels in the memory
of his family’s move to a town with a library that had the
two-volume Birds of Minnesota. For a few years he hunted ducks with
his father and older brother, until he decided he enjoyed bagging a
photo of a duck more than the duck itself.
Johnsgard came to WSC for graduate work because his older
brother Keith was here finishing up a Ph.D. in psychology, and he
wanted to work with wildlife biologist Charles Yocom, who had
recently published the book, Waterfowl and Their Food Plants in
Washington.
Yocom left for another job a couple of weeks after Johnsgard
arrived, leaving his new student to fend for himself—distressing at
the time, but a benefit in the long run.
“It was very significant, allowing me to learn how to do field
work on my own,” Johnsgard says. The O’Sullivan Dam had been
completed the year before. A former student of Yocom’s had surveyed
the animal life of the area before the dam went in. Johnsgard did
the same after the potholes filled. He spent hours every day
punting back and forth across Moses Lake in a small rowboat, noting
the birds he saw and collecting specimens for the zoology museum on
campus.
He went on to the Ph.D. program at Cornell’s Ornithology
Laboratory and post-doctoral work at the Wildfowl Trust in England
before joining the faculty at Nebraska in 1961. Since then,
Johnsgard has written and illustrated nearly 50 books on birds and
other wildlife. He’s also published more than 1,500 pen-and-ink
drawings, 500 photographs of birds and other wildlife, and 150
scientific papers on bird behavior and taxonomy, while teaching
between 7,000 and 8,000 undergraduates.
He says he was one of the first professors at Nebraska to
solicit student evaluations of his teaching. I ask if he got any
good tips from them. He laughs. “One young man wrote, ‘You should
go down to Goodwill and get yourself some better clothes.’” He
did.
 Paul Johnsgard shares his enthusiasm about birds with author Cherie Winner.
Johnsgard’s squabbles with the school’s athletic department,
especially with football coaches Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne,
attained legendary status on campus. He was renowned for expecting
student athletes to meet the same classroom standards as other
students. He defied “football Saturday” parking rules and drove in
to work on game days, was often fined, and one time had his car
towed. He attended the odd game whenever a visiting friend wanted
to go, but lost his faculty ticket privileges in the 1980s when one
guest got carried away cheering for Oklahoma.
He says he might not have come to UNL if he’d known how big
football would become here, but Nebraska was only supposed to be a
temporary stopover for him anyway. His Ph.D. advisor encouraged him
to apply for the job, because it would be a good place from which
to look for a better one.
It seemed like a reasonable plan. He needed a job, and Nebraska,
like all the plains states, was a waterfowl biologist’s heaven in
spring. Fellow grad students at Cornell had visited the Platte
valley and come back raving about the birdwatching bonanza. Even
so, the state remained underrated as an ornithological
destination.
“I was the only professional ornithologist in the state when I
got here,” says Johnsgard. As he saw it, that meant the whole state
was his to explore. His first spring at the university, he went out
to Kearney to see the cranes. He never looked for a job
elsewhere.
Page
1
2
3
4
5
Continued
|
