William Beebe Beyond the Bathysphere: Pheasants, Jungle Plots, Pooh Test

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William Beebe (1877 to 1962) grew up in New Jersey shooting and stuffing birds, taught himself taxidermy, and left Columbia University just short of a degree. In 1899 the new Bronx Zoo hired him as assistant curator of ornithology, and he pushed for a flying cage built over living trees and pools so birds could behave naturally. After a 1904 horseback trip through Mexico with his first wife, Blair, he argued for watching animals live rather than collecting them. Befriended by Theodore Roosevelt, he set out in 1909 on a 17 month expedition funded by Anthony Kuser to document every wild pheasant species, crossing the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, and China, and his observations of sexual dimorphism suggested evolution could move in rapid bursts. The trip was a personal disaster: he fell into depression in Burma, recovered by binge reading pulp novels, fired the illustrators, and Blair divorced him in Reno, then married their neighbor a week later. He erased her from his award winning pheasant monograph.

After working as an aerial photographer in World War I, he set up a station in British Guiana and pioneered the jungle micro study, cataloging every living thing in a few yards of rainforest from canopy to soil. Dredged ocean samples frustrated him, and with engineer Otis Barton he descended in the bathysphere to 3,028 feet off Bermuda in 1934, phoning descriptions to the surface for live radio as critics demanded type specimens. He later married novelist Elswyth Thane in an open arrangement, bought the Simla estate in Trinidad, and left his papers to assistant Jocelyn Crane to keep his wife from writing his biography.

• Stuck in a chair with a broken leg in Venezuela, he recorded bat falcon chicks in the first documented case of wild birds at play.
• At Simla he judged visiting scientists by whether they recognized his Winnie the Pooh statues.
• His 1915 Tetrapteryx theory of four winged bird ancestors was vindicated by the Microraptor fossils found in China.
• Blair accused him of threatening to drown, shoot, or cut his own throat during the expedition.
• Rachel Carson dedicated one of her early works to Beebe.