After a successful career providing wildlife researchers with tools to investigate many living creatures, in retirement Robert Hawkins has focused on birds — all over the world.
Hawkins’ photography studio has no walls. With a pair of binoculars constantly at hand, he scarcely ever ventures outdoors without a camera. Even indoors, he is looking out the window of his high seaside apartment, watching for a gull or frigate bird to exhibit some novel behavior that he can capture on film.
In 2005, within hours of the Department of Interior’s announcement of the supposed rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker near Brinkley, Hawkins, of Sail Boat Key, Fla., called an old college friend who lived near where a suspect bird was seen, and the two men camped in the Big Woods to look for that bird.
Hawkins hoped to take a high quality photo of the elusive woodpecker to bolster the scanty scientific evidence that ornithologists had been collecting for more than a year. He never spied the “Lord God Bird,” but he photographed many other Arkansas wetland birds.
In later years, he returned to the state with a couple of bird-photography acolytes. Those trips had similar outcomes. But the sheer size and global scope of Hawkins’ avian photographic portfolio outweighs his inability to snap a picture of a ghostlike bird many believe no longer exits.
ENTREPRENEUR
Born in a hardscrabble town in east Texas and the youngest of 14 children, Bob Hawkins is more than nine decades into a lifelong interest in the outdoors. As a young man he thrived on sports, hunting and fishing.
His college education at Texas A&M and Southern Illinois University equipped him broadly in the fields of biology and wildlife management, but not photography or birds. His master’s thesis dealt with the nocturnal habits of white-tailed deer. After graduation, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service and in management of a game preserve. As a pastime he enjoyed hunting and camping with his wife and four children.
In 1967 he and his wife, Linda, began Wildlife Materials Inc. in their basement. They developed, manufactured and marketed equipment used by field biologists in research and game management. They got in on the ground floor of transmitter manufacturing at a time when researchers had to “Scotch tape” their own supplies.
The firm first marketed materials that he’d had difficulty procuring when he was writing his thesis — nets for capturing live deer, electronic transmitters to track free-ranging deer, and associated batteries, solar cells, receivers and antennas. As the business grew, he became a significant supplier of such materials to researchers all over the globe.
The company expanded, developing research materials for studying other species — polar bears in the arctic, leopards in Africa, cranes in China, terrapins in the United States and even fish in the ocean. They ventured into other uses for telemetry —tracking memory-impaired patients who wander from nursing homes, fitting transmitters on coon dogs that are apt to be lost or stolen, and monitoring spies in perilous situations.
Wildlife Materials manufactured tiny transmitters and power packs that could be attached to a songbird. The devices weighed so little that they did not impair birds’ flight. “It is not accurate to say that Wildlife Materials invented this device,” Bob says, “but we redesigned the circuitry and miniaturized it and put it into the hands of people who were studying birds.”
In a scientific breakthrough of the mid-1970s (when miniaturization of electronics was in its childhood) one of his telemetry devices was attached to a Gray-Cheeked Thrush for a year. The bird migrated across the Gulf of Mexico to Mexico and then back to Iowa. It was the first instance of continuous bird tracking on a long migratory path.
In 2002 the Hawkinses sold the business and manufacturing facility near Carbondale, Ill., to their employees and retired to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Now they had time to travel, and for Bob Hawkins to pursue his passion — photographing birds.
FREE TO ROAM
He began photographing shorebirds around their seaside home, but he traces his global adventures to a pre-retirement visit with his son in Hawaii. Hawkins went on an expedition with an eco-tourist adventure company, Forest and Trails. The camera and lenses that he took to photograph the grandkids got some impressive images of birds in the Hawaiian highlands and rainforests.
One was the endangered ‘I’iwi, the glamour bird of Hawaii. It is a kind of finch with a specialized beak like the ones Darwin famously discovered on Galapagos.
Another bird-photographing enthusiast told him Africa was a premier location for seeing birds. Soon, he and Linda booked their first trip. They have now made photographic safaris to Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. The Hawkinses have visited 20 other nations and provinces to photograph birds. They prefer remote and sparsely populated areas.
Linda is also a birder, but she seldom takes pictures on these trips. She records the names of the species, helps carry cameras and tripods, tends to travel details and looks after Bob’s health.
In the United States, Hawkins has photographed 575 species of birds. (The contiguous states host only a little more than 600 species.)
He has made long trips to the Big Bend Country and far southern tip of Texas; the Catalina Islands off California; Kodiak Island, up into the arctic circle of Alaska. He has taken pelagic trips on the Atlantic Ocean, sailed intercostal waterways of the Carolinas and waded hardwood bottomland swamps in the South.
To some of these places he has made multiple trips; opening and closing his shutter millions of times and capturing images of some 2,000 species of birds.
THE BIRDS
Asked if he had a favorite, after considerable thought he chose his image of a White-Browed Coucal of Kenya. A large print of it hangs in his home.
The coucal is in clear focus, so clear that the individual branching of each feather can be distinguished, as can the details around the bird’s eye. The obscured background does not distract from the dramatic pose of the raven-like bird, but rather reflects and complements the color of its plumage. The composition draws the viewer’s eye first to the coucal’s head and then to the splayed branch of vegetation above. Finally, the eye drops to the soft length of its teal colored tail.
In Australia, Hawkins’ camera clicked many Rainbow Lorikeets, perhaps the planet’s most vividly colored birds. At day’s end, while editing his pictures, he was reluctant to delete any, for each was more beautiful than the last.
His longtime website, bird.photo.net, is under reconstruction, but users of eBird can see his posted images in the app. Some have been published (about a dozen in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette). He does not typically charge a fee for such use.
OTHER CRITTERS
Although he does not routinely take portraits, there are people in the frame behind the camera who make his bird photography better. Besides Linda, there are birding guides at each location. Familiar with habitat, these guides usually have keen eyes and ears that help locate a camera-shy species.
He met Joseph Mwangi in Kenya. “When we first saw him at the airport he looked to be about 14 years old and we thought he was there to help with our luggage,” Linda says.
“When we discovered he was to be our private guide we were skeptical,” Bob adds, “but boy were we surprised. He was as good as any birding guide I’ve have ever had.”
Mwangi knows birds and where to find them. He recognizes them by their song when he can’t see them, and if they aren’t singing he mimics their song with a whistle so they reveal themselves. Hawkins also touted Mwangi to other international birders. Now,
Recently, Mwangi visited a Florida trade show and then visited the Hawkins family at home.
Another guide, in Ecuador, was a tech-savvy young West Virginian who encouraged Hawkins to begin posting his sightings on eBird, an online citizen science tool where birders add their sightings and photographs to a database that can be used by ornithologists and birdwatchers everywhere.
On a monthlong group tour to Alaska with other birders, he used the services of a Houston-based bird guide, Jim Stevenson, author of the book “In Search of 5,000 Birds.” Hawkins found the eccentric Stevenson engaging, but Stevenson’s rules angered another birdwatcher in the group.
Stevenson returned the man’s money and was forced to briefly abandon his other clients to take him from the tundra to the nearest airport.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Bob and Linda continue to bird several days a week near their home. These days they bird-watch and photograph from their personal vehicle but they are still engaged and energized by the hobby that has brought them so much adventure.
Their daughter, Camille Hawkins James, photographs birds in her backyard in Champaign, Ill. She is particularly adept at photographing tiny birds that move about so quickly it is hard to fix binoculars on them. Her dad thinks she is better than he is.
On some occasions the Hawkinses travel with two other couples they met in college. All are nature lovers in their 80s or beyond.
They all have pictures in their mind’s eye of the natural beauties they have seen. But if they forget the birds, as oldsters are apt to do, they have the photographs of Robert Hawkins to refresh them.
Jerry Butler is a regular contributor to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on topics related to people and birds. Share your stories and comments with him at jerrysharon.butler@gmail.com