Abstract
Victor Fazio of the Shaker Lakes Nature Center recalls his experiences at the Shaker Lakes beginning in the 1970s. Fazio, a bird-watching enthusiast, provides a wealth of information about the bird population at Shaker Lakes over roughly three decades, connecting ecological chages to changes in bird behavior and population. Also discussed is the history of "birding" at Shaker Lakes, which dates back "to at least 1905," emerging from the Conservation Movement of the early 20th century. Fazio credits his interest in bird-watching and environmental issues to his education at Shaker Heights High School, to the mentorship of ornithologist Jean Aiken, and to the community of naturalists in the region.
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Interviewee
Fazio, Victor (interviewee)
Interviewer
West, Julie (interviewer)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
122 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Victor Fazio Interview, 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902015.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/230
Transcript
Victor Fazio [00:00:01] You ready?
Julie West [00:00:01] All right. Okay, Vic, thanks for participating. We’ve already met Justin Hons, and we’re going to be interviewing today Victor Warren Fazio III. And today’s date is November 6, 2006. Vic, did you grow up in the Cleveland area?
Victor Fazio [00:00:30] I was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. My parents brought us to America in 1972, and that was to be a one-year thing, but it was in Boston and my dad was in training. As you know, he’s a surgeon, and he was recognized by the Cleveland Clinic as someone that they wanted to recruit. And we came to Cleveland to further his specialty again as an extension on this little adventure. Well, 30 years later, here we are.
Julie West [00:01:13] And when did you actually come to the Cleveland area?
Victor Fazio [00:01:19] 1973. We were in Warrensville Heights was where we first moved. And then approximately 18 months later, when my father took on a permanent position at the Cleveland Clinic, we moved to Shaker Heights.
Julie West [00:01:44] So that would have been in ’74?
Victor Fazio [00:01:45] Late ’74 sometime. Yeah, it would have been. I started eighth grade at Woodbury Junior High, so certainly I was here by the beginning of the school year.
Julie West [00:02:01] Describe an early outdoor experience that kind of sticks in your mind.
Victor Fazio [00:02:11] Well, as a young child still in Australia, I have these very flashes of memories, you know, that are generic in some sense. But I grew up on the seashore in Australia, and, you know, it’s very hard, it’s impossible to ignore your natural surroundings, especially in the vicinity of rock pools that I would poke about and with, you know, finding starfish and what have you, and inevitably bringing those home and putting them in some sort of saltwater aquarium and having them die overnight and stinking up the place. But my mother put up with it for a number of years, apparently. But in terms of a very vivid, a little more mature memory event that really set me on my path. It was actually something that took place right here in Shaker shortly after. It was that first, maybe the second fall was 1975. October 1975. Very distinct memory. I don’t know if you recall 1975 very well, but it was one of the extraordinarily warm seasons back before we really had a series of them, as we have had in recent years. It was actually an El Nino event I’ve later researched. But that Indian Summer that October was, I mean, it hit 80 degrees. I recall it very, very well. And I had just formally begun my notebook, my first bird notebook. On October 1, 1975, is my first entry, House Sparrow. We were living on Kenmore, and at the time, I actually had no idea that bird watching was done by people. I really, you know, I was clueless. You know, I didn’t have that sort of, you know, traveling around at that age when you might learn of these things or before. That just didn’t set in. And so- And I think I might have had- No, I didn’t. I did not have my first field guide at that time. What I was using was my interest of birds had burgeoned a few months earlier. Was one of those, you remember, it was very popular in the ’70s. You had these sticker albums, coloring albums that in the back you had stickers, you know, and I had one on birds, you know, and my dad had recently purchased. And honest to God truth, this is what happened. It was one of these very warm, like 10th of October, approximately. It was very, very warm for October. And a tiny little yard on Kenmore and basically is one tree in the backyard, one giant oak tree. And I’m there coloring in, just looking at stuff, you know, and there’s this tap, tap, tap on the oak tree right above me. I look up and there’s this bird that is just all these colors and it’s just nothing like I’ve ever seen what, you know. But then I was like, I just was looking at that and I went to the back of the book and there I’m literally looking at a bird and looking at a picture. And that was an epiphany for me that there was possible to have before you in a book a picture of something that you’re looking at right at the same time. I’m 13 years old and I’m like, wow, that bird was a yellow-bellied sapsucker, a male. And I was like, I can identify stuff. And there you have it.
Julie West [00:06:16] How would you describe your own environmental or nature education?
Victor Fazio [00:06:23] I had no- Until ninth grade, I was exposed to no formal such thing. I mean, it really came about beginning at age 3, tracing my grandmother’s peacocks around in rural Australia. And in fact, I, I don’t recall it exactly, but my mother informs me that I pestered him just a little too much and was struck in the crown at age 3. And in fact, to this day you can feel a little lump right there. It’s the scar from getting a little too friendly with the peacocks, but that sort of, you know, very rural Australia. My mother’s father was, after the war, World War II, was retired from various things that he did, but he was a forester, what you would call lumberjack, perhaps today in very rural Australia. So you couldn’t get away from all manner of creatures around you. You lived with it very much in Australia. So that was really my upbringing and just being encouraged, being inquisitive. And it wasn’t until ninth grade that here at Woodbury I had biology. The first time I had a formal biology class of any kind. And the teacher was Mr. Flaum. I think that’s F, L, A, U, M. I can’t recall exactly, but he really took to me. And so he was really sort of my first mentor away from outside of the family. And he begun that year, I believe, a sort of field naturalist club, one of those out, you know, things you did, extracurricular sort of things. And Fridays, Friday afternoons, he would take the class or anyone who wished to, you know, walk across the street to Southington, what is now Southington Park. We called it Bicycle Jungle back then. And that was- Well, I suppose I must have been 12 when that begun. 12, 13, right in there. And it was, you know, he was not a birder per se, or anything, but he just, you know, would point to, you know, we’d walk about and look at this plant or those leaves and trying to explain things. I actually don’t recall seeing very many birds at all during those. But that was my first formal exposure to that type of mentoring.
Julie West [00:09:41] When did you first start coming to the Nature Center? Either the physical building or the lands around the Nature Center. And that includes, like, Lower Lake.
Victor Fazio [00:09:51] Right. Trying to get the timeline right because it was, I mean, Mr. Flaum, his outings to Southington Park were 1975-ish, I do believe, in 1976, the summer of 1976, as part of some sort of event associated with the Cleveland Clinic, a picnic for residents or some such that we- There was a Horseshoe Lake picnic. And it was my first time at Horseshoe Lake. And we were still on Kenmore at the time, so I wasn’t really that close to me wandering over there, but it was my first realization that there was more than, you know, there were lakes. You know, I hadn’t come over here, so that was kind of neat because it was summer, so you don’t really get a full sense of the size of something fully vegetated as it was. But even so, I thought, I thought, wow, this is cool. You know, all those little back swampy bits, you know, jungles that, you know, a kid can roam around, you know, get lost in, I imagine, all manner of things. So that was my first time at one of the lakes. Now, early the next year, we moved to- My parents moved to South Woodland, where they remain to this day. Corner of Attleboro and South Woodland. It’s a five-minute walk to Horseshoe Lake. So now I was becoming very interested formally, sort of formalizing my study in my mind. I’d had a couple of years of notes under my belt, you know, just note taking, sort of experience and refining that sort of thing. And so that fall, September, late August, September of 1977, was my mother saw something about the Nature Center and that they had junior naturalists program. Showed up on a Saturday. That was kind of tough because I was into soccer and soccer matches were on Saturdays. But I would come down here and get a couple hours in and then go do my soccer match in the afternoon. But that was the beginning of that. That was when I met Cindy Schwartz, that sort of thing.
Julie West [00:12:51] What kinds of things did you do as a junior naturalist?
Victor Fazio [00:12:57] Well, that was before the boardwalk. And you remember the late winters of the ’70s, ’76, ’77 onwards, were heavy snows and so the spring flooding was exceptional and I think remains exceptional from what I’ve seen over the decade, past couple of decades for that period. Four here in fact. I think one of those floods, you can go back into the newspapers and read about one of the floods that basically put Coventry underwater, but that pretty much rearranged whatever trails were in place, which of course were marked by railroad ties. And if there’s nothing more fun for a 14 year old to do is to pick up an 85-pound railroad tie and see how far he can walk across the parking lot in front of the girls, you know. So, yeah, we had a lot of fun. Trail maintenance, I would say, was 85, 90% of what we were doing in the two and a half years I was here.
Julie West [00:14:23] So most of your time was spent outside as opposed to inside learning?
Victor Fazio [00:14:28] Yes, you know, towards after the first year or so, there was a little more opportunity for indoor care of exhibits or the animals. And it was sort of given over to you as an option of how much time you could balance with that. You know, I came into a real neat group of guys. It was just a really neat coincidence of personalities coming together. We’re all 15, 16 years of age and I remember them fairly well. And we were a tight bunch, about four or five of us. And we, you know, pretty much did what 14, 15, 16 year olds do and, you know, bond through challenging each other to the max over everything. And so, yeah, we remained outdoors pretty much and had a lot of fun with it.
Julie West [00:15:45] And did everybody- It seems like you have a high interest in nature and wildlife- [crosstalk]
Victor Fazio [00:15:51] Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And in particular, birds. I mean, what- You know, we were all bird watchers and the- Well, the five of us, anyway, that sort of were tight were maniac birders. I mean, you know, manic about it. So that was the tie that bound us.
Julie West [00:16:27] So did you spend time either with them or on your own here in this area, other than when you were doing the junior naturalist?
Victor Fazio [00:16:38] This really was our base of operations. This is what brought us together. There really was very little opportunity outside of this experience to get together. Most of them were Cleveland Heights School District. I was Shaker, so I didn’t know any of the- There was one other younger one that was about three years behind me who came up, Chip Freund, who was Shaker, but Chris Lee, Chris McCulloch and Mason Flint. Actually, Mason was in Shaker, too, but he must have been in a different school, not Woodbury. And so this was really where we got together, you know, without transportation or anything like that. We weren’t going to be going anywhere else.
Julie West [00:17:37] And you mentioned a Cindy?
Victor Fazio [00:17:39] Yeah, she was the-
Julie West [00:17:41] What was her role in the Nature Center or the naturalist?
Victor Fazio [00:17:45] Well, she coordinated the naturalists and she was our- From time to time she would have an assistant. Particularly later in the first year or two. We really didn’t have a great variety of activity other than what was done right here. But Cindy did everything she could to support us and encourage us. And it was really her who saw to it there was some sort of implemented a reward system which I don’t think was in there, in place in earlier years, whereby at the beginning of the next school year or something, rather there would be a field outing, a special trip out of state, I believe, Hawk Mountain one year. And if I recall correctly, there was a visit to see the cranes at Jasper Pulaski in Indiana. I was not on either one. There were conflicts with soccer or some such thing. But I do know that they took place. I was on one. Oh, that’s right. We went to Cornell University, Laboratory of Ornithology. That was the one I could make that was special because that wasn’t merely for the sake of just visiting the lab during my senior year. So when I was 17, through a quirk of Australian U.S. education calendars, I ended up a year ahead. I graduated high school shortly after I turned only a couple weeks after I turned 17. So actually I was still 16. I was still 16 when I went to Cornell. And that was a consequence of having taken the homeschooling program in ornithology that was offered brand new by Cornell Lab at that time, only the year before. And it was a fairly expensive thing. But Sydney. Excuse me, Cindy. Through, I believe, funds of the Nature Center paid for a course and then photocopied 10 of us who went through it. So that was brilliant. I mean, I really appreciated that at the time. And to end, to conclude the course, we actually took a trip to Cornell that was ultra cool.
Julie West [00:20:47] Any other memories in terms of specific things that you did or that happened to you when you were in this junior naturalist program?
Victor Fazio [00:21:08] [long pause] No, no, I really can’t say. You know, I mean, I have specific memories of the guys, but, you know, birding. But no, nothing really jumps out.
Julie West [00:21:24] You said that.
Victor Fazio [00:21:26] Well, there is, I mean, the one little thing that we would participate in, in fact, were crucial for was the fundraising, the seed sale of seed, bird seed. That was in fact, I think it was part of those funds that we ended up depending on how much seed was sold and so forth. Juniors naturalists were funded to some degree from that, but that was a big deal. There were two such events, I think two such sales, one approximately about now in November, and then one a little later. And we would haul thousands of pounds seed and people. So that was another thing that would be our event.
Julie West [00:22:24] So when you say haul it, you would just get it into people’s car? Or would you have to go sort of get it?
Victor Fazio [00:22:27] A full-size 18 wheeler would come in. I mean one immense- And it was packed to the ceiling, I don’t know how many tens of thousands of pounds. I mean, enormous amount. And quite literally, people who had pre-ordered, you know, would simply to be just a train of cars coming in one way, going out the other. Someone would pick out the train coming in, someone pick out an order form, go in, they would process it. It would make its way out to those of us at the trucks. You had guys in the back that were just bringing it to the, you know, one end and then people picking it off. And then you had the car by that time, you know, ideally you would have it in their trunk and it was nothing to handle, any one of us, 2,000 pounds of seed in an afternoon.
Julie West [00:23:34] What changes have you seen in the Nature Center or the grounds over the years that you’ve been coming here?
Victor Fazio [00:23:44] Well, quite a few, I guess. Things really started to change dramatically from what I had taken to be the norm. Norm is what I was accustomed to from exploring every square inch of the parks. And I mean, literally, I’ve walked every possible, not just path, but everywhere. So in the late ’70s, I became fairly familiar with the vegetative structure throughout, what it should look like throughout the season, what the water levels are and so forth. And I’m probably not going to remember exactly year to year but in the early ’80s, roughly in the ’81 to ’83 period and I was at Wittenberg University at the time, so a lot of these things happened while I was not precisely here. I would see their aftermath. And you had- I think it first started with Horseshoe Lake. If you imagine the north tributary coming in at Horseshoe Lake and the back there, the back area, it was a through road at one time but it’s been blocked off long since. But they, that was a very wild area, very overgrown. The stream was completely, you know, the riparian corridor was intact. You know, I mean it was a young growth, secondary growth. It was probably no more than 40 years old at the time. But even so it was the type of situation that I came to learn harbored a great many birds in migration, but in particular in winter it became the place that we would go to look on Christmas bird count, for example, for something that shouldn’t be there. Some half hardy species like Towhee. One year we had a Catbird even if we didn’t. Yellow-rumped Warbler would be another example. Even if it wasn’t terribly rare. There were species that at the time checklists and any birder would tell you should be quite uncommon throughout Cleveland for example. White-throated Sparrow. White-throated sparrow. Nowadays with the weather as it has been, winters as they have been mild, is not terribly uncommon. Wintering even here in Shaker. But in 1979, 1978 it most certainly was. And for you to report 10 or double digit figures was rare bird alert time. And yet there was an occasion when in early December I think it was 1979 or 1980, I recorded 128. And it was a combination of this tremendous cover, this microclimate that made things milder than the surrounds. And also several of the estates above on the hillsides were prolific for feeder contributing to feeders. So they had the energy source and you had the cover So it was a wonderful little spot. Well, sometime I think it was 1981 or 1982, a new power line, telephone poles and the whole bit went in and removed. They left much of the understory intact. But anything was a dead snag gone, several substantial 60- to 70-foot oaks gone. And that was sort of that marred the situation. But it still was not quite the final insult for that particular spot because about 10 years later I’m not really sure, may not have been that long ago actually they further improved the embankment which requires removing any vegetation. And subsequent to that, only a few years ago the bridge itself, the bridgeworks, the original sandstone bridgeworks gone and now you have a very nice, clean, modern-looking bridge and absolutely no vegetation anywhere around it. And so that, that was a very real loss there. I have in the past three winters part of the Ohio breeding, excuse me, Ohio Winter Bird Atlas visited that area and it simply no longer supports that winter avifauna, not even remotely close to, simply cannot. So that’s one tiny example.
Julie West [00:29:41] What about down at the, at the Lower lake and closer here to the Nature Center? What have you seen in terms of changes?
Victor Fazio [00:29:51] Well, in keeping to the timeline, I’ll say about two years later or so, ’83, ’84 is when the dam works at Horseshoe Lake were improved. And it’s a very nice walkway today. And if you’re there today, imagine yourself right at the dam at Horseshoe Lake looking downstream. You are now set away from the woodlot below you approximately 25 meters. Prior to that the woodlot began 8, 10 meters at the most from you. And I’m not talking about a little understory, you had quite suddenly 80-foot, 90-foot oak trees, a beautiful wall of them. And as a consequence, and of course you were elevated and to the extent of 20 to 30 feet and closer to this canopy. The thing about high canopy oak is in the fall it is rich with leaf foliage, masticating insects, inchworms and such. And if you really wish to see, you know, I mean this area is famous for its Spring Warblers but it really has just as many species and individuals, if not more individuals in the fall. But they are canopy, you know, they’re very hard to see, they’re very difficult. And so in a fall Warbler watching is this just that much more difficult? But here was an opportunity and a horseshoe in general, this is true. But it was fabulous Warbler watching because of your proximity to the canopy both in terms of the trees just a few meters away. And I remember some wonderful, wonderful observations there. But that, you know, the riprap went in, you suddenly were- The canopy was taken much farther away from you at the same time, of course the earthen support was greatly expanded. That actually gave us grassland as a habitat type in Shaker which we lacked prior to that. I had, I mean to encounter even a Field Sparrow, briefly in April migration you would get, five would be great and one peak day. But something like a Savannah Sparrow that was really a true grassland species where somebody somewhere would get one bird accidentally be spotted, you know, but suddenly he was this grassland across from the school, the school there, you know. And I went out and, oh, there’s 13 Savannah Sparrows, you know, and pond, you know, those, you know. So, you know, things change and, you know, there’s things, you know, one you take away from one thing and you add to another. Now, concurrently, I think it was just a little after that, but about then you had Lower Lake drained. I’m not exactly sure about that because I know in 1984, you know, those, those floods back to 1979 really did quite a bit on as far as depositing silt, tremendous amount of silt. And to this day there’s that little bit of mud that you see right off the Larchmere bridge that did not exist prior to about ’80, ’81, ’82 is about when it really, it surfaced as a consequence of those floods. And by 1984 it was quite substantial. So much so that I routinely, that summer of ’84, routinely in July and August during the shorebird season, visited because daily we would get an overturn of shorebirds and uncommon shorebirds for here, not merely the few Yellowlegs or Solitary Sandpipers and Killdeer, but the first record, I believe, of the Shaker Lakes park of Western Sandpiper I had in July of that year on that little spot because it was attracting upwards of 10 or 15 someone, sometime I think as much as 30 of these little peeps, you know, and mostly Least Sandpipers. But, you know, we did get a Western Sandpiper record out of it. And so that was, I think it was its max and it was getting quite overgrown with vegetation. I mean, the vegetation had come in and then of course that silts in even faster. And I think then subsequently that came in and dredged and then took that opportunity to also do probably the greatest shoreline vegetation removal that I’ve seen here, and that is down there at Coventry, at that end of Lower Shaker Lake, where, how can I say it, that entire end was forested. It was very thin, it was only three trees wide, but the entire bank was treed. A number of trees had fallen into and lay as logs. It was some 60 feet long. In some cases. Those trees that were standing were generally only about 30 to 35 feet tall. But what that offered was one, a significant buffer against the traffic of Coventry. And so in terms of just diminishing the noise as you walked about Lower Lake, it was significant. But more than that, in the ’70s we started to see some cyclical changes, significant ones with regard to the state population of Black-Crowned Night Heron. And sometime in the early ’70s there was a famous roost that I believe it was at the, somewhere on the Cuyahoga. I’m not really certain I know the- I know there was one at the Zoo. I’m not sure if it was that one or another that for aesthetic reasons was removed. And I believe you can find that mentioned in the literature. Now whether that was really that was coincident with. But I’m not really sure it was cause and effect. But certainly it correlated with Lower Shake Lake being used as a fall post breeding dispersal staging area.[background noise increases] And we actually came to know where these birds came from by virtue of the fact that we had this first year bird with a patagial marker, a red flag attached to its shoulder in black lettering. A-7. Well, A-7 was to return for the next two years. And his origin was West Sister Island. Not surprisingly that would have been approximately ’78, ’79, ’80, those three years. I think I have a photograph of him, I think still somewhere. But he was one of up to typically 30 Black-Crowned Night Herons that would come every fall. Generally 7th to 10th of July would be the first one to show up. And almost- And every year really it was pretty consistent, peak around the 1st of September and then you would get a cold front and then just about all but one would disappear. So it was really this staging area post-breeding from the western basin of Lake Erie. Very few would be adults, but of course that was entirely removed and we did not see any in the late ’80s. I was here in 1989 because I was about a five-year period there where I really wasn’t based in Shaker very much. But in 1989 I spent the entire year sort of looking around again at the changes. And sure, three or four, maybe five could be found up at the Larchmere bridge end, you know, but that roost gone just did not support that cover, you know, it was no longer there. And of course I had consequences for simply not allowing waterfowl a certain amount of respite from hikers, joggers, dogs, not that they were specifically flushed or you know how it just by virtue of having that buffer there. If you were to find something that was not a Mallard, something a little more interesting, a Ruddy Duck or you know, 1979 with White-winged Scoter and a few things of that, you know, some interesting things, they would invariably be found down in that little nook pretty much, if you think about it, farthest from most any other source of disturbance that you might find. And I just don’t, you know, it’s. This is my impression now. I don’t really- Can’t say for certain, but my impression is I just don’t see that type of waterfowl, divers and such, resting in that area. As long things are coming and going. Whereas before they seemed to rest for a week or two. And so that’s possible consequence there. And subsequent to that, you then had, you know, again, the bridgeworks. So, and I mean-
Julie West [00:42:16] At this end of the lake? Or down at the end? Coventry.
Victor Fazio [00:42:18] Well, no, down, downstream end. Yeah, that’s, that’s more modern, that’s more recent, you know. You know, to take you back to 1978, April 1978, from that, the old dam, the old bridge. I have a vivid memory. 13th April 1978, you could look up Perry Peskin’s bird records, because it was a bird walk. It was one of them. It may have been my first bird walk. I’m not sure. I suspect so. And there was a crowd, 30, 40 people. And right there on the shoreline looking down is a Sora. Sora Rail. And that was a life bird for me and quite a few other people. That’s the type of thing that you could find wandering about the edge because of the cover that we had. We once had little reeds, a little patch, tiny, nothing to look at, you’d think. And you can still see some remnants of it down in the north side of the lake. But it was larger. And at that time, when it was larger, Snipe could be routinely flushed from there in April. And if I may go back, because I skipped it, what you see today, for that matter, what you saw beginning sometime around again, the mid or early ’80s in what was the flower garden, or I’m not sure what the formal name used to be. But in the late ’70s, you still had that little stretch between Coventry and the Lower Lake. That little patch was a tremendous depression. You can see a tiny patch of depression, but that’s nothing [compared to] what it was. And there’s a structure down there - it’s been buried, you know, I don’t know what that was exactly, but that depression - and it was always water in it, was always much cooler. The microclimate down in there was substantially cooler than- So on a warmish day in May, it was strange, but it would attract the rarities. If you go through the bird records and you see records, and particularly in the ’70s and the ’60s, because I gather some of this from Dave Corbin, very, very active birder at the time. If there was a Connecticut Warbler, if that was a Worm-eating Warbler, these southern overflights, these Summer Tanager, there’s a Blue Grosbeak record for Shaker in 1955 that is from that specific spot. It’s the only record for Shaker that I’m aware of. And so it was always a delight. The highlight of the walk around the lake was to venture into there to see, okay, what are we going to find now? I know for a fact that there are dozens of birders from that period who they got their best looks of a Connecticut Warbler because they, down in there they just were approachable and what have you. So that was the first during that wave of dam reinforcement concurrent with that of Horseshoe Lake is when that was buried. So that was a disappointment.
Julie West [00:46:39] Other changes that you’ve noticed?
Victor Fazio [00:47:02] You know, there are specific site little changes that, you know, you come to. I mean there was still quite a surprising number of empty housing lots in the late ’70s, to my mind, some of them fairly large. I mean, you thought, I mean I would think to myself, here’s this massive mansion here and one there and here’s enough room for two more. And in particular I’m thinking of the just up here on South Park and Lee. If you come back towards this three houses I believe, I believe it’s a fairly large white mansion. If you look at that, that did not exist when I was birding here in the ’70s. And in fact you could walk from there all the way to Shaker Boulevard. That had to be 150 meters or more, maybe 200 meters. Plus, I don’t know, 60 meters wide. It was quite a small. And it was grass, it was mowed. Except that they would mow it once maybe and then let it go the rest of the summer. Well, that was a routine- It was a regular location for Woodcock displays in March in the spring. You could go there and up to five or six males are displaying around. You know, it was, I mean, I mean to be here in Shaker and have Woodcocks just- It was just amazing. And when I first encountered that, I just took it to be, well, surely they couldn’t nest here. I mean it’s just a transient thing. But during my breeding atlas work I did in fact locate a nest on- It was located here in the woodlot across the street from there, directly across right about where I found some marijuana growing one time when I was birding. I mean, yours truly sees these potted plants, they were along the- I would use- Because they were so thick across the growth, I would use the stream as a means to bird. You know, I just get white waders on and that was that. I would walk from here all the way to Lee. That was one of the best birding treks you can do in the spring. And I came across these three or four potted plants. And I mean, I was like 14. I was naive as anything. I hadn’t- It’s like, what in the world are these? And do you know, I mean, here I am as naturalist, I plucked some of the leaves and I came down here and keyed ’em out. [laughs] It’s like cannabis, what’s that? Oh, well. [laughs]
Julie West [00:50:19] The little known fact.
Victor Fazio [00:50:20] Oh, yes, I have seen some odd things, probably left better unsaid.
Julie West [00:50:29] What about any recollections regarding the trails when they were put in either the boardwalk or the Stearns Trail in back?
Victor Fazio [00:50:42] Well, that was about the time that I- Well, I was in college at Wittenberg, so I wasn’t sort of firsthand privy to it. And I just sort of showed up one day and it’s like, oh, this is cool. I mean, I knew, you know, it had been in the works. [phone rings] Sorry, it had been in the works, I think for several years at least. Talked about or, I mean, basically, I think it came out of the, again the ’78, ’79, you know, because as much as we, I mean, we saw all that work with the railroad ties get washed away a couple of seasons in a row, you know, and that got a little old. And so, yeah, the idea of a permanent elevated boardwalk was pretty much in there five or six years before it came about. It was just a matter of securing funds and so forth. I wasn’t directly involved in any way.
Julie West [00:52:01] We’ve talked a bit about some changes you’ve seen in the habitat which has impacted the birds. Any specific recollections around the plant species or tree species changes in that mix?
Victor Fazio [00:52:19] Well, unfortunately, I suffer a mental block when it comes to botany. I’m not terribly good. I mean, I look more in terms of vegetative structure, sensitive to that because that’s what determines a lot of what I- The correlations you have with birds as well as other species of vertebrates. Yeah, I certainly wouldn’t be an appropriate authority to really get to species level changes. You know, I can sort of reflect in a generic sense some of what I’ve been informed of anecdotally over the decades of how things, you know, one of the things people have to really understand is nothing is static. And even for all the changes, I simply, I just recounted their changes from what I- My baseline, my baseline is the late ’70s. Well, my baseline is wholly different from 30 years prior to that. If you go back to the ’40s and even up to about the mid-’50s, this was a much more open, forested situation. I mean today we have Pileated Woodpeckers. That did not exist in the late ’70s. We did not have the maturation of the surrounding forest. I mean, in part you had to have maturation, further maturation in the forest here, but you also had to have North Chagrin and other populations get to that point where you had extra birds to disperse here. And I believe I had a record in 1977 and then there was one in 1979 and I think there was one maybe two years after that. And they were exceptional records. But as a key species for identifying, identifying how mature a forest you have, that’s a very important one. So it was beginning, you know, you had the beginnings of dispersal into this area. But they were transient, you know, and it wasn’t really until I would guess seven, eight years ago that we started to get bird sightings of Pileated that stuck around for a month or two or so. And of course now we more or less permanent resident, aren’t they, would you say? You know, but they’re regular, you know, uncommon, but we have them. So if you go back to the ’50s, you know, Woodpeckers offer a very, very good story as far as the story of vegetation here in the Shaker Lakes. 1981 was the first year that a Red-bellied Woodpecker bred here that anyone recorded. I recorded. It was right here behind the Nature Center. I can probably show you the hole today. If the tree still stands. It’s actually right next to that one little walkway in the way back. You walk across the creek, it’s right there. And so Red-bellied Woodpecker is this, again, a woodpecker that requires- It’s not as demanding of tall canopy forest as a Pileated is, but it still likes closed canopy mature forest. It was just a winter visitor, rare winter visitor here prior to its existence, breeding in the 1981 and then became, you know, a regular summer resident. And now they’re common. At that time, the woodpecker of note, the summer woodpecker here was Red-headed Woodpecker. Red-headed Woodpecker is a savanna species, open canopy. Horseshoe was famous, but they weren’t merely at Horseshoe, they- There were typically, typically five to six pairs at Horseshoe Lake, typically two pairs in the back here of the Nature Center, one pair usually in front. So the immediate property you had three. Southington park had one to two. Down at Coventry was typically a pair. And the Shaker Country Club also supported up to about five pairs. Well, that’s pretty substantial. I mean that’s- And of course today we’re excited about one. Again, and it goes back to, you know, this was a very, very open habitat at one time. Much of the forest that you would call streamside or lakeside trees were pretty much saplings around 1940. This was a popular- You had a canoe club, you had people boated on the lake. And up until World War II that was still the thing to do here. And I’ve seen some photographs. More than that, a patient of my father’s- I’m not gonna remember her name exactly. She only passed away a few years ago, three or four years ago, but lived across from the boathouse since approximately, I believe 1930. And about 1980, perhaps even just a little before that, we were over at her house for dinner or get together or something or other. And I recall, you know, she knew my interest in birds and so forth and she related something of how things were when she grew up. And these were not roads, these were horse trails. And she, you took a horse and buggy up the hill, up Cedar Hill, to get here and, you know, and you had of course in this, in even as late as ’78, ’79, you still had a little bit of the arch of that boathouse down there at the boat ramp. You still had the- Of course, I think it was ’79 or ‘80, someone said, okay, that’s too dangerous, it’s going to fall on somebody’s head. And they took that out. Now you simply have the foundation. But you know, I have a photograph, you know, where Attleboro and South Woodland, basically around Horseshoe Lake, our house, my parents’ home was built 1920, ’21. There’s a photograph of the property before the house was put in and it’s treeless. Okay? There’s not a tree in the photo. It’s a, it’s a- Probably was a cornfield or something. And if you look at some of the bird records in the 1920s here you have things like the only record of Smith’s Longspur, a May record, 19, I’m going to say 1923, but mid-1920s, and I know a lot of people subsequently, birders today will look at that and they think Smith’s Longspur, a species only to be found on bare open earth, certainly didn’t occur Here, and quite a few people do question that observation. It was a local biologist, high school biology, I believe, who took bird- You know, he was- I forget his name, but the bird walks. Back in the 1920s, bird walks were actually very popular in Shaker Lakes. Very popular. In fact, had been in place for a decade or more at that point. Birding in the Shaker Lakes has a very long history and has a published history going back to at least 1905.
Julie West [01:02:25] And where were they?
Victor Fazio [01:02:28] The Cleveland Bird Calendar, and actually its predecessor from the Herrick Society. And I’ve read those. I’ve read pretty much every bird record from a Shaker going back to 1901. And if I may digress, I’ll tell you a little anecdote from one of the earliest, earliest entries with regard to a bird record. And again, this goes to what we’ve seen as far as our environment changing over the past century, not merely from habitat, but other factors today. Well, I don’t think today we think of American Robins as harbingers of spring. Maybe 50 years ago, we still did. They certainly don’t leave anymore. And really, that was not the case in the ’70s, and I’ll tell you a bit about that later. But in 1905, 1901, if you read the nature columns of the day, and believe it or not, every small newspaper in Ohio or large had a nature column far more prevalent than it is today. This was an age of inquisitiveness that frankly, I don’t see repeated in this country since really on a broad scale. You know, today we get pretty darn excited about the Plain Dealer having an outdoor column which didn’t exist two and a half years ago. You pick up a paper from Tiffin, Ohio, from 1900, and you had a nature column because this is when people started collecting eggs and, you know, in the backyards, nests and just looking at stuff, you know, and it was that interest that was the progenitor of conservation and progenitor of field guides and so forth. Well, in 1901, if you read one of the earliest entries for Shaker, you read about- I mean, I just get a kick out of this. I mean, I just- I didn’t think about this, but Blue Jays. Blue Jay was a harbinger of spring, not American Robin, because Blue Jays arrive on the ides of March. You can actually read that as an entry. That is what Blue Jays did here in the Heights. Blue Jays could winter down in the Flats. You had a microclimate going on down the Cuyahoga, but they would not- They could not winter in the Heights. If you think about it today, in winter, most highland areas, especially deciduous highland areas, you have a withdrawal of Chickadees and Titmice. And even the resident species, White-breasted Nuthatch, will not spend their winter up on the ridges in southeast Ohio or anywhere else. They withdraw down to our riparian corridors. There’s a lot more insects, it’s protected from the wind and so forth. You have a mild decline. The Blue Jays would withdraw not in terms of range, not in terms of migration, but the Heights, they simply did not winter. You didn’t have people throwing tons of sunflower seeds out for them to survive. And so the thrill, to tell you that spring had arrived was to have a Blue Jay in your yard right around the 15th of March. That’s the way it was. So to come forward a bit in time, 1940, you still had a lake, Lower Lake, largely devoid of any trees, vegetation. It was very exposed. And what was 1940? Well, it was the end of what was a 14-year heat cycle that matched or even exceeded to some extent what we’ve experienced the last 15 years. People don’t remember that, but beginning about 1928, 1929, things got a little hot around the United States. By 1930, it was starting to be called a drought. By 1933, it was the drought to end all droughts. And you had the Dust Bowl years in Kansas and Oklahoma, which was the last another six years out there. But it really did not that that period did not end until about 1940–41. Well, 1940–41, we have a record here in Shaker Lakes, another one that sort of tells you a little bit of how things may have been. Because today it would look rather aberrant is a Black-necked Stilt record. It was actually hit by. I mean it was- It’s a roadkill record for Coventry right at the corner there of Lower Lake. Well, we know, and I’m extrapolating because I don’t have photos of the period and I don’t know what the lake looked like, but I know that after a number of warm summers and high evaporation, we have seen quite a bit of mud develop here, and what it would have been like at the end of a 12, 13, 14-year period of excessive heat matching what we see today. I mean, for all the records that have been falling recently, if you look at some of the old records, they still exceed what we have today. And at a time when I dare say there wasn’t quite the dredging operations that we see today, if any, I have a suspicion that we would see, as was common in a lot of other more natural lakes, late season, late summer period where the lake was so low, you had a significant amount of shorebird habitat in the way of mudflat. And this is an August record. I believe it was 1941. And it’s in the Birds of Cleveland. It’s really subsequent to World War II, when you had the Garden Club and other people starting to plant things. It really is what gave us what we see today in terms of shore vegetation to support the surrounding trees. And so, you know, I remember, shoot, is it- Gosh, might have been Jean Eakin. I’m not sure. It could have been one of the other early birders telling me - it might have been [inaudible] Caruthers - about the little peninsula, what the birders called the peninsula. If you look from Larchmere bridge to on the right, that spit that comes out from the pine trees, that was bare of trees. I mean, you could probably take some tree rings and find out exactly how old those- But that was a grassy spit well into the ’50s. It was not let go of the forest or to come up until mid, late forest. So, you know, just, again, just an idea how things are. You know, you have to sort of look at, you know, not just 10 years or 30 years. You really need to go back in history to see how things change. And, you know, I’m, you know, I’ve always described myself as a biologist, as someone who I observe, record data, and, you know, I leave it to others to draw what conclusions they wish to from that. But all I can tell you is, you know, things are just continually changing and there are going to be losers and they’re going to be winners in that process.
Julie West [01:11:37] You mentioned Jean Eakin. Did you have contact with her? Were you here when she was doing her bird banding? What kind of recollections do you have of that?
Victor Fazio [01:11:49] I have very fond recollections. Jean was very special to me, very close. She was my- After Mr. Flom, she really was my second mentor and one of the two major figures in my really, what was to be my ornithological career, the beginning of it. I met Jean in that first fall, September 1977. And I’m not sure what the first impressions she had of me were- I was very unsure of myself. It wasn’t until the spring, the following spring, that I was much more confident in my birding skills. March, April of 1978, and I was, you know, I was 15. But I was now determined to make this a career. I made that choice at that time. This is what I knew. I mean, I am doing today precisely what I chose to do when I was 15. And I guess that impressed her enough to allow me to go about on her net checks and merely observing. I couldn’t touch anything that spring. But by the following fall, fall of 1978, I was- She taught me to extract birds and I proved rather dexterous at that. Her fingers weren’t so dexterous, so I actually began taking most of the birds out. Of course, this whole experience is a matter of learning birds in the hand and molt and aging and things that, oh, my goodness, you can do this with a bird and learn all these things and so forth. And I was just a sponge and I couldn’t get enough of it. So I progressed very rapidly, which I attribute a great deal of that to Jean and her support in that regard. She was between her and Dave Corbin really were key.
Julie West [01:14:51] How long did you assist Jean?
Victor Fazio [01:15:03] Into September of 1980? Two and a half years. It was late September 1980 when I went to- Well, I started my undergrad in the fall of ’79. But she would band the school year at Wittenberg, late September, something to start. So I would manage to get four or five weeks of the fall. So two and a half years. And then for the next three years or four years while I was at college, I would still be able to help her out in the early part of the fall season. Yeah.
Julie West [01:15:51] Can you describe a little bit of her operation, like where the nets were? I think she did some educational things. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Victor Fazio [01:16:03] Well, this is for the most part, this is before the boardwalk. So it was entirely in the fore portion of the Nature Center here area, the marsh. I think there was more nets, I guess would be to the west here than you presently have. Vegetation was a little different, I think a little more jewelweed or something rather.
Julie West [01:16:48] In the marsh area or?
Victor Fazio [01:16:50] Well, just at the end of the parking lot here. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I remember a couple of nets back there. I remember I bugged her every so often. Like, why can’t we put a net back in the. No, wouldn’t do that. And, you know, had to keep them all in the one place. But the vegetation on the. Out toward the road is also a bit different and it’s much more thicker today. And so we had a couple nets out there too, because you wouldn’t be able to do. In fact, it’s much overgrown there. But they were accessible at the time. Otherwise, you know, pretty similar to what you have today, I think generally 10 nets, I think. I don’t remember too terribly the specifics very well.
Julie West [01:17:56] Were you helping her when some of the school groups would come and see the operation, or would that be when you probably were in school as well?
Victor Fazio [01:18:06] Yes, it generally was not when I was available.
Julie West [01:18:10] Were you helping on the weekends predominantly, or just before?
Victor Fazio [01:18:16] Well, when I was in college of course, during that lead up, five, six weeks or so, Any day that she was here. And there were times when she was here every day, not always. So. Yeah.
Julie West [01:18:44] When we talked earlier, you had mentioned to me about a senior project that we did here. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Victor Fazio [01:18:51] Yeah. Oh, gosh. My senior year, high school, Shaker offered a little more progressive- It’s a biology class, but it was called something like environmental studies. And I won’t recall the teacher’s name, but she was quite progressive for the time. And among things that we did were as a school trip, we went down to an EPA hearing in the Flats that was on- I mean, it was very, you know, lawyers and I mean, it was dry as anything, you know, and something about lead or mercury or in the city was in violation. And like, oh, boy, this is environmental biology. I was not particularly into the legal aspects of those things, but she exposed us to a variety of things. And another thing that she did was we had these EPA water quality kits. And they weren’t your little toy kits. These were the real deal. And you could do E. Coli. And we sampled. I sampled Shaker Country Club, Green and Marshall Lake and Horse Horseshoe Lake, and we baked our E. Coli in the incubator and, okay, I’m never touching this water again. It was off the chart. It literally was off the chart for EPA E. Coli counts everywhere. We sampled in the Shaker Lakes. But of course, I was birder. So what was my senior project going to be? I had- I’d been subscribing to Science News, little weekly magazine, and somewhere in there I came across this reference to what was to become called the SLOSS debate. S-L-O-S-S. And it’s this famous philosophical scientific debate that took place, well, origins in the early ’70s and then sort of hit its stride in the late ’70s, early ’80s, and then sort of morphed into other arenas in the conservation biology movement of 1985 onwards. Those sort of consolidated 1985, but prior to that you had this competing notion as to whether several small parcels of land would offer the best solution in terms of maintenance of biodiversity versus a single large entity. And of course, you had proponents, the single large national park type people, huge wildlife refuges, especially in places that had populations of large mammals like bison or elephants and bighorn sheep and such. Whoever found themselves in charge of trying to maintain the populations certainly would simply say to you, no, you cannot have. It’s just not worth your while to set aside a bunch of these tiny little parks on the other side. You had those that just said, okay, that’s nice, but reality is there’s just not a lot of money to buy or for that matter, political momentum to go out and just, I don’t know, throw everyone off their land and try and get one giant park together. It’s not going to happen in a place like Ohio. But that left open the academic question, scientific question, as to whether really what you could do with small parcels of land, say, for example, like the Emerald Necklace, you have this connective series of reservations. You know, they are of course, principally there as recreational, but do they, in terms of biodiversity, maintain some reasonable semblance of what we would expect to be typical of Northeast Ohio, for example? You know? And if they didn’t, what might we do in terms of improving corridors? That’s when you had the whole idea of corridors conceived. It was worked on and modified over the next 10 years or so anyway, to get, I thought, okay, coincidentally, you had in 1978, the publication Donald Newman, who was a resident here in Shaker or Cleveland Heights, I think Cleveland Heights. Donald Newman published Birds of Cleveland Region, the pamphlet version update of Williams, A. B. Williams, 1950 Birds of Cleveland, the book. And this was through the Natural History Museum. And so this was, you know, like it was the first updates in 1950. So it’s the first thing that you could see and look at quickly, these bar charts and you had the phenology, the charting of the occurrence of birds throughout the calendar year for the Cleveland region of Cuyahoga County and its surrounding counties. Well, okay, great, great resource. Could I go about a bunch of bird transects on weekends through that fall 1978 and spring of 1979, looking at migration, could I recover in my data a reasonable facsimile of what I saw in this greater Cleveland area? Approximation, just published, in other words, getting at the question of whether Shaker Lakes was a reasonable proxy for the appearance of birds in migration in the region? Of course, I did this in the mindset of a 15 year old. So it’s not quite as formally hypothesized as I enunciate today. But that is, that is what I was trying to get at. And lo and behold, I’m pretty confident, you know, I didn’t do any biostatistics on it, of course, at the time. But when I looked, you know, I did some tables and summaries and, you know, and looked at guilds, and if you look at guilds, meaning the Sparrows and the Warblers, and you looked at groups like that, and so if you looked at terrestrial songbirds and to a lesser extent, some of the other terrestrial species, Cuckoos, Woodpeckers, you do see a remarkable, in my opinion, concurrence with the Greater Cleveland area. And so that told me that by 1979, anyway, with respect to terrestrial songbirds and migration, Shaker Lakes was indeed a very important representation of the areas. It offered as much here in its tiny little 240 acres or so as what you would see in the greater area.
Julie West [01:27:56] And when you’re saying the Shaker Lakes, you’re including, like, from Horseshoe?
Victor Fazio [01:28:00] Yes, I believe I still have my original map and my transect. And of course, you know, this was at a time when I was still learning my vocalizations, which is the principal way in which you identify birds. I mean, today, probably 90 to 95% of terrestrial songbirds I would identify by vocalization rather than looking at them. And so it would take me the entire Saturday and then the Sunday following morning to complete my transect, which I. I believe it was 10km, trying to. And I always walked the same plot and so forth, kept that up. And I started out the corner of Attleboro and South Woodland where I lived, and then do Horseshoe and then walk down here, and it included Marshall and Green Lake, too, because I would do the loop. I would come down here, and the only thing I would leave then to the following morning would be the Lower Lake area, actually from Shaker down to Coventry, that would be the next morning. So I could do everything else the first day. And of course, you know, actually about, like, 1989, I reproduced it just to see, and I did it in six hours. So the whole thing, yeah, it helps to know that that call in that bush is a juvenile Cardinal, which you only hear in late July and early August into September maybe. And it’s nothing like any other Cardinal. And so, you know, if you don’t know it, you have to spend all that time hunting it down. And of course, you know, later on you just walk by it and it’s like, oh, yeah. So. And then, of course, that, you know, once I did that, I was like, okay, well, I wonder what breeds here? And so it was the summer of, well to some extent the summer of ’79 sort of looking around but I didn’t formalize it until 1980. So 1980, ’81 and ’82 I had a formal. And I have those notes. I dug them up. I keep meaning to photocopy them and give them to you. I will. That would be great. Looking at my handwriting I’m like, wow, I could write. I mean I had this beautiful cursive writing. I don’t know what happened to that. So I definitely got into the breeding and by 1981 I’d spotted things in the first season that I couldn’t confirm. And then I was like, okay, I’m going to try and confirm that Acadian Flycatcher. I got a. There’s one spot in Shaker that has Acadian Flycatcher and it’s the Halley and it’s. And it’s. And specifically it’s south side. And sure enough I found I. Because it was this nest about 60ft up and I finally found it with removing a few fecal sacs. But I think it’s 53 species that I ended up confirming and that data is in the Breeding Bird Atlas. The Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas was the first season, 1982 and in ’82 or ’83 you had Dan Best as a naturalist here. And Dan and I got along very well and he. I’d come in and again I was still in college but you know, stop in and see him as much as possible and tell him about what the birds were around. And I believe it was spring break in 1983 that he mentioned. Oh, there was this Breeding Bird Atlas which I hadn’t heard about and he had been formally. He had a formal request. The atlas is, you know, there was one in every six blocks of a quadrangle. One sixth of a quadrangle is your data point. However, they also accepted data from discrete special areas and ultimately they published about 113 special areas across the state that did not fall into one of these blocks. A 10 square mile block, Shaker Lakes was chosen as one. Dan basically said, what do you have? Unfortunately my 1980 and ’81 data couldn’t be used but I had 1982 and then I didn’t have a lot of time in 1983 or ’84. I did research in the Bahamas and Panama those summers so all I could do is really sort of hit and miss on a few things like Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Scarlet Tanager that are very marginal here just to see if I could confirm or not. I think I confirmed Rose-breasted Grosbeak, but never did confirm Scarlett Tanager. But that’s what appears today in that publication. You’ll see a dot, round dot as opposed to square. That specifically is Shaker Lakes and that’s what I gave Dan. So yeah, it was that period. That three year period is when I we had our first Canada Goose when he’s young. It was the last year, 1982 for Black Duck. And it may, that may well be the last breeding record for Cleveland. Not sure, Cuyahoga County, I’d have to check that. But and I, you know, things like Red-bellied Woodpecker I mentioned already and Acadian Flycatcher was kind of neat and that sort of thing. My only Yellow Worbler record I had Chestnut-sided on territory with a female. Two males and a female had a Horseshoe but they never nested. They ended up disappearing mid July. So yeah, and then there was one final formal study I did here for myself and that was the spring of 1984. Now the spring of 1984, even though what. I did again a thesis, honors thesis in my college undergraduate thesis. And so I sort of took half that year off and just took some light courses in the spring. I didn’t have any formal coursework, but I had to finish my thesis and write and then present so I could do that here. And living with my. Back in Shaker, because the presentation was going to be at Case Western Reserve at the Ohio Academy of Science meeting that year just happened to be there late April. And so. Okay, well, I’m writing, come out here and I’ll do a Hawk watch from Larchmere bridge. My first day was 20th of February, 1984. It’s a rather interesting day on the 20th of February. It was about 70 degrees. It was one of those days that we just have these powerful southwest winds, ridiculously warm. And of course, you know, you have a front coat through and the next day it snows two feet. But you have these strong southwest winds. And I had suspected for a few years that, I mean, I knew you knew on southwest winds in April, you know, Hawks and you see some Red-tails in March occasionally. But I suspected, you know, how early could you see this? You know, is there a threshold temperature and so forth? And the 20th came along and I could see from the weather it was going to be this tremendous push. And I recorded something like eight birds of prey that day, a Red-tail or two and maybe a Kestrel, I don’t know. But it also included a Golden Eagle right there on Larchmere Bridge, 2 o’clock in the afternoon, right overhead. And that’s documented and it’s in the Cleveland Bird Calendar. Published. One of my earliest published records. I was to put in about 20, 25, 26 days of observation. Pretty much anything that was a southwest wind and appropriate conditions. Simply parked myself on Larchmere bridge with a view that you could see something of the Portage Escarpment. Because my hypothesis was they were moving along the escarpment in migration. And for the most part, you know, it would be 30, 40, 40, maybe 50. You get one day of a lot of Turkey Vultures. You get that one peak day for 14 Red-shouldered Hawks or something around St. Patrick’s Day. Typically is the case every year. But of course I was really looking forward to the Broad-wing Hawk flight. And it occurs the last four days of April pretty much like clockwork. And I happened to pick a really good year to do that Hawk watch. I don’t know that this would be reproducible in too many other years because what took place in a minor scale takes place every April. You have that transition period from winter to spring. Well, winter to summer, but we call it spring. It takes place in April in Ohio where winds become. You get a lot of northeasters and northeast winds can dominate for periods of two weeks, sometimes three in April. That’s when we start to get weird things like Eastern Yellow Warblers, excuse me, Eastern Palm Warblers, we call them Yellow Palm Warblers, the eastern race. If there’s going to be a record in Northeast Ohio, it’ll be late April typically. So you have this pattern that is not conducive for migration. And sure enough, April 1984, approximately the 15th, 16th of April, you had this pattern set in, dominated by northeast winds, inclement weather, terrible weather, a lot of fog, even on days when it wasn’t sleet or what have you. Bottom line, nothing was moving for quite a bit time, longer than normal. Your average migration wave in spring is every six days and often faster. So anything past six days, it’s a bottleneck. Well, this was a tremendous bottleneck and this is very well documented around Lake Erie, this event. It was a Wednesday. I’m thinking it was the, the 24th or 25th of April. It’s in the record. It was not noted in Ohio that well. But on the north shore of Lake Erie there was a floodgate of floodgates were open and migration of birds that is on a scale that rarely is seen in the Great Lakes. It’s very well documented on The Ontario side of the lake. To give you a brief example, at Long Point Bird Observatory, where I was to begin work only a few months later. So I’m very familiar with the data. In a single day, on that day, on that Wednesday at 9am when the fog lifted, I was here watching Hawks. But they were watching 8,000 Juncos, 5,000 Golden-crowned Kinglets, and 2,000 or 3,000 Ruby-crowned Kinglets fly past a single spot. Two guys simply stopped and spent the day counting birds, flying directly past them off the point. At long point, Ontario, 8,000 Juncos. Okay, just simply on another order of magnitude over above what we consider a good day most years. Well, here what I saw were 550 Broad-winged Hawks. The next day 250 or so. And then about two days after that was another wave of something comparable 4 or 500. So for the season, I believe I ended up with close to 2000 Hawks. Not quite, but 15 or 1600 of them were Broad-wing Hawks that occurred in that space. And I have to wonder, every year, if you go out on the 26th, 7th, 8th of April, you will encounter a kettle of 50 to 70, maybe 100 Broad-wing Hawks. But I suspect those weather conditions is what led to that concentration. I don’t know that that would. Maybe one in every five years you might get something like.
Julie West [01:43:24] Okay, I’m gonna go back and ask you some more general questions and wrap it up at least for now. Maybe more things that come up that we’ll maybe do a second session. I think we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything in particular? Well, let me ask this question. You were a junior naturalist. You spent some time with Jean Eakin, with Dan Best. Were there any other nature center programs that you were involved with, more structured or formal type programs in addition to the Junior Naturalist?
Victor Fazio [01:44:16] No, not expressly.
Julie West [01:44:20] Other people that you interacted with for a period of time when you were here that you have memories about, either on the staff or volunteers?
Victor Fazio [01:44:30] Well, I mean, I was acquainted with the staff and Rich Horton, you know, but I didn’t really have, you know, any real dealings, you know, and, you know, there were docents that came and went, and I don’t recall them specifically, you know, if I may just for the record, just mention again the, those young, the guys that I was with here because they were a special bunch of guys. Perhaps first and foremost would be Mason Flynn. Mason I came to know. I was 15, he was 16. He was a new arrival here from Marin County, California. He grew up in the shadow of Point Reyes Bird Observatory. One of his mentors was none other than Will Russell. If you don’t know Will Russell, aside from being one of the great field ornithologists of the west coast, he greatly influenced the Golden Guide, especially the 1983 revision of the Chandler Robbins Golden Guide. Birds of North America basically corrected the 1966 version and all his corrections were implemented. He also published them several separately in a booklet a couple years earlier in 1979. I think what was interesting or what is interesting about that is that when Mason came out here he had a photocopy of all those notes, handwritten notes of Will Russell, things on stuff on Empidonax Flycatchers that nowadays is the basis for field guides that did not exist in Peterson or anywhere in the ’70s. And here this was the treasure map. I mean and we just ate that stuff up. And because back then even the big guns around here did not try to identify the Empidonax Flycatchers too rapidly anyway, so Mason and I, we were very close. In fact we for our sort of high school graduation together 1979 as we bought one of those month Greyhound ticket specials go anywhere. We got on a Greyhound bus and ended up in Nogales, Arizona long before we either I didn’t have a. I couldn’t drive. We hired a birder out there, 30 year old guy just drive us around for 5 days. And identified 170 species of birds we’d never seen before. And why he had seen some but I hadn’t seen Eared Trogon only third North American record. And that was fun. But so yeah, the significance, I mean Mason and then Chris McCulloch and Chris Lee and a couple years behind us, Chip Freund. William Freund. Chris Lee was a musician and Chris McCulloch he was the bad boy type. They all went on to college, but they got away from birding. Chip I think ended up in Columbus for WorldCom at one point into computers, that sort of thing. Mason, I only just heard back from him very recently he’s in Seattle. Not sure doing what, but the significance of that group. We were highly competitive, as you would expect for boys of that age. But it wasn’t football, soccer, it was birds, it was field guides and honest to God we come to the Nature Center each week. We hadn’t seen each other during the week and it would be like what’s that bird on page 67 of Peterson? Scientific name. I mean and we could do that with each other. We did that week in, week out and it would be like. And we did not talk in English. It Was scientific names only. So here I am at 15 and it’s like yeah, Dendroica virens, you know, there’s one right there. You know, we did stuff like that. We, I mean it was always outdo each other. But the point is it took us to heights at a time when that was rare and it was special and I took it to heart and of course. But you know, it was funny because you know, a year or two later I’m in college and you know, there’s professors that would just sort of imagine that you couldn’t possibly know this stuff. You know, it’s like sorry, but I memorized every word in every one of these field guys. I mean just it’s there, I don’t have to think about it, you know. And it was because of those guys.
Julie West [01:51:33] Other memories related to the Nature Center that really stand out. Obviously that was a very powerful memory. Are there others that stand out like that?
Victor Fazio [01:51:50] I mean I do need to say a word about the bird walks and Perry, you know, Perry Peskin, you know, there was an influence there. It a little different influence. Perry was the first person, probably the first person that I that presented with to me a genuine skeptic, shall we say. And especially when this, you know, upstart 15, 16 year old started identifying stuff. I had very good hearing. It wasn’t so much knowledge, so much at first as I simply could hear the White-breasted Nuthatch calling 150 meters down the trail before anyone else. I probably was quite obnoxious in announcing that fact long before anyone could possibly see it. But to me it was just quite natural. White-breasted Nuthatch there. But by virtue of his resistance to that it certainly was a positive influence in terms of knowing what I needed to have established in identification before calling it out or before. And at the same time to me the bird walk as a bird count. I’ve always thought that way. I’ve always. I just count stuff, I just do that, can’t help it. Probably a little obsessive compulsive about that. But I didn’t realize quite the social significance of a bird walk. Let’s say I was just sort of, well, let’s say oblivious to that fact actually. And to me, you know, if I went around and someone at the end of the walk said how many crows there were? I said well this 27. While everyone else is sort of like didn’t we just see the same three every, you know. Well no actually, if you were paying attention. And of course I was once again obnoxious but, you know, it did sort of put me on the track of, you know, just wanting to count stuff because nobody else was, you know, and nobody paid attention to what was flying over. So I was like, well, you know, didn’t you see that Cormorant? It was only 500 feet overhead. Because turns out Cormorants migrate over Shaker lakes routinely by the dozens today, probably by the hundreds. If you know the time of day and the right weather, you sit out there and you stop and count instead of trying to look for a Cormorant sitting on the water, which it virtually never will do. And so I was, you know, it made me aware of, by virtue of the fact that I could identify what in my mind was a very narrow approach of bird watching, where else I could look. So I ended up looking everywhere else that people weren’t. But in time, after five or six years, I was actually, by 1979, come to think of it, I was co-leading the walks. He was a little understandably resistant to that.
Julie West [01:56:00] Other standout memories?
Victor Fazio [01:56:04] That’s pretty much covers. I mean, you’re making me think of things that I wouldn’t have thought about for a while.
Julie West [01:56:15] Kind of. In closing, how would you describe how your experiences associated with the Nature Center or the area around here have shaped your view of the natural world? If there was an impact there, what was that impact?
Victor Fazio [01:56:43] I don’t know if I would go so far as to say shaped my view of the natural world. It definitely shaped how I was to go about or greatly encouraged, certainly my wanting to observe the natural world. It certainly laid the foundations for more circumspect, more considered approach, formal data collection, asking questions first, then addressing how to, I mean, basic scientific approach really is what it amounts to. Long before it was formally given to me in college. And it was just by example. It wasn’t by lecture, simply the example. The naturalists here and how they were conveying, you know, information to the public and how Jean went about obtaining information, observing how others, visitors, lay people would come here to use information was very important. That is something that I would say is greatly lacking in the education of a biology major, say at university is you’re just being lectured to. If you’re lucky, you get some field practice, practical experience to get a sense of what that information means. But you never, unless you go to a nature center or similar education facility, education-oriented facility, you don’t get to see how that scientific information is brought into a wider audience, brought into a layman’s parlance that they understand. And as a consequence, I think biology undergraduates are really missing out. They in turn have to then go through some sort of, you know, if they go into academia, you know, they have not been exposed to how to convey all this research information into their own lecture series or if they go, I don’t know, it just. I think you really need to have an understanding of how the public is getting the information, even if you are. As I would put it, as I put it that I shine that it’s for me to be on the front lines in terms of observing and gathering the data, but having a sense of how that data is going to be used or seen, perceived, potentially spun by various organizations greatly enhances my ability to. Well, I take into account all manner of bias that put it that way in terms of how I obtain information and control for as much as possible, make it as objective as possible. And I believe, and actually I know this from just being in the business for 25 years is I’ve seen my colleagues quite oblivious to how some of their information may be interpreted because of some loose means by which they gathered some aspect of it they didn’t take into consideration. And I see both sides abusing information environmental today. I see environmental organizations that really overstep what the science says and of course I see other interests, industry or what have you that for the most part just have knee-jerk reactions and would just rather ignore it. And I’ve never, I’ve made a point of being right down the middle with everyone and I think that has a lot to do with being out, having been exposed here at this Nature Center and other education centers of how it is the information ends up in the hands of the people who vote. I think that’s critical.
Unidentified Voice [02:02:15] I hate to be the-
Julie West [02:02:17] Running out of time?
Unidentified Voice [02:02:18] Yeah, I do have to get back to the office to get in because I don’t have my own key.
Julie West [02:02:22] Well, we best let you go then. Okay.
Unidentified Voice [02:02:27] We can always reschedule another one if you all like to. I’m available [crosstalk]
Julie West [02:02:34] Okay. So I guess we’re done.
Victor Fazio [02:02:38] Okay.
Julie West [02:02:39] Thank you.
Victor Fazio [02:02:39] Sure.
Julie West [02:02:40] Yeah. I know you’re going out of- [recording ends abruptly]
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