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L I F E S T Y L E S

FOODWEDNESDAY

Newsday WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2001

1997 Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland

Part2The

Naturalist

When DennisPuleston died lastweek at 95, the worldlost a passionateprotector ofthe woodlands,the marshes, therivers and all ofnature’s creatures

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A Cafe That Celebrates the Mind, B3

When DennisPuleston died lastweek at 95, the worldlost a passionateprotector ofthe woodlands,the marshes, therivers and all ofnature’s creatures

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Birds were Dennis Puleston’s particular joy. But all that natureoffered was in his care during the 95 years of his adventurous life.

“And on the shore the wild doves mourn in theevening and then there comes a pang, some kind ofemotional jar, and a longing. And if one followedhis whispering impulse he would walk away slowlyinto the thorny bush following the call of the doves.” — John Steinbeck,

“The Log from the Sea of Cortez”

ALL HIS LIFE, Dennis Pulestonheard the doves — the dolefulcall that signals spring. No won-der his family picked this quotefrom Steinbeck for his memorialcard. The doves called to him ofrebirth and the earth’s awaken-ing. Of green places and wildthings. And oh how they sang.

I wish they would sing to methat way. I write about gardensand nature — about the living

things that grow in the earth and rustle in thewoods. But I have never heard what Dennis heardand when he died a little more than a week ago, Icould only think what a loss it is for all of us whotreasure this island we live upon. Who see the horse-shoe crabs mating on the spring tides and contem-plate ants and ospreys and search for wild orchids inthe marshes and listen for the mourning doves.

The doves of Dennis Puleston’s heart were not al-ways doves, of course. Sometimes they were yellow-billed cuckoos and scarlet tanagers and wood thrushesand rufous-sided towhees. And the ospreys that hehelped bring back from the brink of extinction to thePaumonok he loved as perhaps no walker of thewoods and voyager of the bays and rivers has sinceWalt Whitman.

Throughout the days and nights of his 95 years— some of them spent in howling ocean storms andsteaming jungles and frozen ice fields — the doves

that called to Dennis Pulestontook so many shapes. A golden-headed quetzal showing off itsshimmering iridescent plumagein the Venezuelan cloud forest.Puffins swarming in the air likegigantic bumblebees on a deso-late island off the coast of Nor-way. Chinstrap penguins mat-ing in the shadow of a volcaniccrater spewing smoke and ashin the South Sandwich Islands.A wandering albatross soaringin the wake of his ship as hecruised the Southern Ocean.

From the day he stared at theblack-speckled blue eggs of a

song thrush’s nest as a 3-year-old in his native En-gland and fell in love with birds to the final monthsof his long life, Dennis was always plunging intothorny bushes and looking at far horizons both realand remembered.

When he was 25, he embarked on a six-year round-the-world voyage in a 31-foot yawl. He sailed theSouth Seas with a 4-foot boa constrictor named Eg-bert coiled around his waist at the steering wheel.He dined with cannibals on the island of Ndeni andwas kidnapped by armed natives on Espiritu Santa

Island in the New Hebrides. He was tattooed with ashark’s tooth by Samoans. He visited Antarctica 38times — mostly in his later years as a cruise-ship nat-uralist, a job he took after he retired as director oftechnical information at Brookhaven National Labo-ratory. He voyaged to the North Pole on a nuclear-powered Soviet icebreaker, and when he reached theTranspolar Bridge, he drank a glass of champagneand took a quick swim that he called “the polarplunge.”

As a naval architect with the wartime Office of Sci-entific Research and Development, Dennis helped de-velop the DUKW amphibious landing craft thatbrought troops ashore in World War II. He trainedthe servicemen who operated the 21/2-ton vehiclesand was wounded by shrapnel in Burma and re-ceived the Medal of Freedom. He was in the dunes atNormandy catching his breath and listening to thesounds of battle around him when he heard a sky-lark singing. “I was deeply moved by this one ele-ment of sanity in the whole mad business of war,” hewould write years later. “That bird made me realizethat someday all this would be over and I could enjoybirds again the way I had always wanted to.”

He came back to his adopted land of Long Islandto enjoy them. No matter where he adventured, Den-nis always came back to Long Island. He came backwith his battered Bausch and Lomb binoculars and apoetic sensibility that never grew old. “Long Islandis so much more than shopping malls, concrete high-

ways and crowded towns and beaches,” he oncewrote. “There are still cool woodlands, quiet rivers,salt marshes, overgrown meadows, and rolling sanddunes to be enjoyed by those who have the eyes toseek and the desire to learn about the other LongIsland.”

Dennis’ book “A Nature Journal” is a bible of thisother Long Island. But he did more than teach usabout our natural world — he was a pioneer and aconscience in the fight to preserve it. He was thefirst chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund,which started on Long Island in 1967 and sued theSuffolk County Mosquito Control Commission tostop spraying DDT in local marshes. That led to astatewide and then a nationwide ban of the deadlypesticide. It all started with Dennis’ observations ofhow DDT was affecting ospreys on Gardiners Island.He had never seen an osprey until he came to LongIsland and he didn’t want to lose them.

He also persuaded his friends Maurice and CecileWertheim to give their hunting preserve on the Car-mans River in Shirley to the federal government as a

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Three watercolor paintings by Puleston, who was the firstchairman of the Environmental Defense Fund: from top,an osprey, white-winged crossbills, and common loons

of the

At 25, Dennis Puleston embarked on a six-yeararound-the-world voyage. Above, circa 1933, he’s at thewheel of the Marit, sailing from Newfoundland.

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To read a previously unpublishedLetter to the Future from DennisPuleston, go on the Internet toNewsday.com/features

wildlife refuge. And he convinced his own mother-in-law to give part of the family acreage to further pro-tect the river. Dennis and his wife, Betty, and theirfour children lived in a white cottage on the banks ofthe Carmans. He painted the ospreys that nested ona platform in the marsh not far from the house andtook in a menagerie of creatures that ranged from aturkey vulture to a pregnant turtle.

He was a writer and a painter and a botanist andan ornithologist. Birds were his particular joy. Heheard them with an inner ear. I would give almostanything to be able to sense nature as he did. Espe-cially in a place deep in the Pine Barrens that henamed Warbler Woods, a forested oasis in Yaphankwhere Neotropical songbirds come to breed. I walkedthere recently with one of his friends, Marilyn En-gland, the president of the Open Space Council thatDennis helped found and the director of the The-odore Roosevelt Sanctuary in Oyster Bay. I wasafraid of deer ticks, nervous about poison ivy andplagued by giant mosquitoes. I saw a red-eyed vireo

and an Acadian flycatcher and the redder-than-a-car-dinal flash of a scarlet tanager in the treetops, but Iknew that nothing would have bothered Dennis andthat he would have seen and heard volumes more.

“I’d meet him on the trail during spring migration,and he’d be so excited,” Marilyn told me. “He’d talkabout an experience he had four or five years ago. Itwas fall and he was canoeing on the Carmans Riverwhen a huge flock of tree swallows — thousands ofbirds — flew up from the wetlands and were swirlingall around him. He was amazed. Whenever I sawhim he’d say, ‘Did I tell you about the tree swallows?’I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And he’d smile and tell me again. Henever lost his awe at the wonder of it all, he nevergot tired of it.”

“He could see birds with his ears,” said SteveEnglebright, the state senator who is a geologist anda naturalist and fought alongside Dennis to save thePine Barrens. “I remember him in Warbler Woods in1980 or ’81. It was the first time I was in the fieldwith a gifted birder. He whistled and made birdcalls,and he was talking to a half-dozen species of war-blers and pointing out others too quick for me to see.I mean, I was a geologist — rocks don’t move thatfast.

“When he was on the edge of the Carmans River, itwas like he was part of the ecosystem,” the senatorsaid. “He was a sweet, sweet, unassuming man wholeft a legacy of green on our island that will never goaway.”

We were talking on the phone and I could hearSteve Englebright crying.

THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS whoknew Dennis Puleston admire hisoneness with nature. John Turner,a naturalist and director of conser-vation programs for The NatureConservancy, recalls the first timehe met Dennis. “I was a youngbirder in my late teens. I saw himas I was walking into his most trea-sured place, Warbler Woods. ‘Whatdid you see?’ I asked. He stoppedand talked to me, just small talk,

but I couldn’t believe I was talking to DennisPuleston. Years later, I was at a meeting — it wasone of the first planning sessions of the Pine Barrenstask force — and I looked over at Dennis. He wassketching an American kestrel. It was beautiful,perfectly proportioned, and he was drawing it frommemory.”

Art Cooley, another founding member of the Envi-ronmental Defense Fund, was a fledgling teacherwhen he met Dennis 55 years ago. “We went on abirding trip and Dennis said, ‘Next time, bring alongsome of your students.’ That started 20 years of fieldtrips. Dennis was a natural teacher. Just threeweeks ago, I heard him teaching his nurse how toidentify the yellow finches and grackles and housesparrows in the backyard.”

A nurse was helping Dennis when I visited him ayear ago. He said he’d been slowed down by heartsurgery. His hearing was failing, but he got on an ex-ercise bike every day and he still turned out the faith-ful and lovely paintings of the birds that sustainedhis spirit. We talked about wild turkeys and tigersalamanders and brown tide and over-fishing andthe dwarf beech forest endangered by a proposed golfcourse in Riverhead. “Why we need another golfcourse I don’t know,” he said, his voice strengthen-ing, and I could imagine him with his fellow environ-mentalists in the small office in Stony Brook wherethe anti-DDT fight began with the motto “Sue thebastards.”

He told me about meeting his wife. It was the sum-mer of ’34 and Dennis was taking a break from hisround-the-world voyage, working as a sailing instruc-tor at the American Yacht Club in Rye. Betty Well-ington, soon to be a student at Bennington College,was competing in the women’s sailing champion-ships for the Great South Bay racing team when shetumbled overboard into Long Island Sound. Dennisjumped in to rescue her. “Are you all right?” he

See PULESTON on B13

Puleston tours Wertheim Woods, circa 1955, with daughter Sally and son Peter. Puleston persuaded the Wertheimfamily to donate land near Carmans River in Shirley to the U.S. government as a wildlife refuge.

Newsday Photo / Thomas A. Ferrara

Puleston’s wife, Betty, right, with their daughters, SallyMcIntosh, left, and Jennifer Clement, at their home inBrookhaven hamlet.

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asked. “I’m fine,” she said. “How areyou?”

Betty — whose family had resi-dences in New York City and the ham-let of Brookhaven — kept up with Den-nis through his letters to the yachtclub commodore, who turned out to bethe father of her college roommate.When Dennis returned to give a lec-ture three years later, they made adate. But the malaria he’d contractedduring his voyage flared up and he hadto cancel. “My dates weren’t coming upwith those kind of excuses every day,”Betty said last week when I stopped bythe cottage again. On Feb. 2, 1939,they married. After an adventuroushoneymoon sailing to Tahiti, they setup housekeeping on the banks of theCarmans.

From the start, life at home wasfilled with creatures great and small.Dennis rescued a mourning dove thathad fallen out of its nest. Betty keptivy plants on either side of the fire-place and that’s where the birdroosted. “When we were first marriedand living on $60 a month, we invitedthe local doctor over for tea,” she re-membered. “The mourning dove flewout of the ivy, landed on the table andwalked all over the cakes. The doctorpolitely refused the cakes, but we atethem later.”

Dennis’ four children all became nat-uralists. His oldest, Dennis Edward, a38-year-old anthropology professor,was killed in 1978 when he was struckby lightning on a Mayan pyramid inthe Yucatan. Jennifer Clement raisesalpacas on the property next to her par-ents and has followed her father as anaturalist on adventure cruises allover the world. Peter, also an onboardnaturalist, lives on a farm in NewBrunswick, Canada, where his sister,Sally McIntosh, works at a naturecenter.

AS KIDS, theydidn’t have to gooutdoors to findthe natural world.Dennis had a petturkey vulturethat he namedAlger because thebird hissed. Hewould come to thedinner table withAlger on his shoul-

der. “This was a bird with a 6-footwingspan,” Sally told me as the sistersremembered life with father. “Oneday, Alger grabbed the steak right offthe serving platter in the middle of thetable.” Art Cooley remembers a daymore than 30 years ago when he foundDennis snoozing at his easel, paint-brush in hand. Alger was perched onDennis’ shoulder — sound asleep aswell.

There was the injured nighthawkthat roosted on a log in their fireplaceand that they fed dried flies. And theturtle that crawled into the house andlaid eggs under the piano. Betty was inthe hospital giving birth to one of herdaughters. The day she came home,the turtle eggs hatched. “Guess whogot more attention,” she said with achuckle.

Every morning, Dennis would go ona mile-long walk along the marsh.He’d take his binoculars and his note-book and his pet sheep. On the week-ends, there were field trips — usuallywith Art Cooley and his students tospecial places on Long Island wherethe tiger salamanders bred and thewarblers sang and the woodcocks

called. The children would keep jour-nals and make reports on the fernsand mushrooms and wildflowers theysaw in the woods.

“Even when we were really little, healways made us feel special,” saidSally. “He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky,you have small hands so you’re theonly one who can reach up into thenest and count the eggs.’ And he’d liftyou up high so you could see.” When hebanded birds, Dennis let the childrenhold them and feel the softness of theirfeathers and the flutter of life and re-lease them into the sky.

It’s not surprising that spring washis favorite time of year. There wasthe annual pilgrimage to hear thespring peepers and see the matingdance of the woodcock. Jen and Sallyare in their 50s, but they reached backfor childhood in front of me as they imi-tated and described the chirps andbeeps of the courtship ritual. “And heloved apple blossoms,” Jen said. “He’dlie on his back under the apple treeand soak in the blossoms like he’dnever seen or smelled them before.”

At night, while the children didtheir homework, Dennis sat at hiseasel painting birds. Classical musicswelled in the cottage — the operas ofPuccini and Verdi, the magic ofBeethoven and Brahms and Mozart.“He always said the American redstartsounded with the first three notes of‘The Barber of Seville,’ ” said ArtCooley.

Dennis was well into his 80s whenhe went on his last nature cruise. Bythe time he was 90, he’d painted 230species of birds that live on or visitLong Island. When he was 86, heturned his diary into “A Nature Jour-nal” for his children and their children— there are seven grandchildren andthree great-grandchildren with an-other on the way. One of his grand-daughters, Shelly Clevidence, who is32 and lives in Portland, Ore., is preg-nant with her first child. She camehome four months ago to spend thedwindling time with the man whotaught her to drive and told her naturestories.

“Once he had us out on a 14-milehike on Gardiners Island and he keptus going with Tarzan stories,” Shellysaid. “They all had an environmentaltwist, of course — like Tarzan was sav-ing the jungle from a conglomerate.”

Last winter, Dennis wrote a note tothe friends and family members whowould celebrate his 95th birthday. “Ihave survived assaults on my carcassby Brookhaven Hospital, shipwreck,open heart surgery, Japanese shellfire, malaria and sundry other attacks.I am living on borrowed time.” Hisbirthday actually fell on Dec. 30, butas he wrote in his trembling but clearscript, “we are celebrating it on Satur-day, November 11 because Jen andPete will be working in Antarcticalater in the month and I didn’t wantthem to miss it. P.S. Please don’tgrieve for me when I’m gone. It hasbeen a wonderful life, and furthercause for celebration.”

Dennis touched the barnacle-encrusted head of a gray whale in a for-eign sea but found enough beauty inhis own backyard to make Long Islandhis homeport. He was a walker in Pau-monok and he wanted nothing somuch as to preserve it. We should alllisten for the warblers and watch forthe ospreys and remember DennisPuleston. n

PULESTON from B6

A Man of the Natural World

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