Richard Hooper Pough, the foremost land preservationist of his time and a versatile innovator in bird conservation, died at his home in Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, on 24 June 2003. During his 99 years he left his mark on such institutions as the National Audubon Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Nature Conservancy (of which he was a founder and first president). He joined the AOU in 1942 and became an Elective Member in 1947. The bird identification guides he produced in 1946, 1951, and 1957 complemented Roger Tory Peterson's by including additional information about food, breeding, and conservation.
Pough (pronounced POE) was not an inyour-face preservationist. Rather, he was a wheeler-dealer land developer turned inside out. “If someone comes to me and complains that a majestic forest is about to be cut, I ask, ‘Are you a man or a mouse? Go out and buy it!’” Sanctuaries such as Pennsylvania's Hawk Mountain, Florida's Corkscrew Swamp, Arizona's Arivaipa Canyon, and South Carolina's Congaree Swamp are among the many open spaces and wildlife habitats he persuaded the affluent to buy and preserve.
Pough was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 19 April 1904. He was a graduate of MIT and in his early adult years worked as both a chemist and a mechanical engineer. During a visit in 1932 to Hawk Mountain, he was appalled by the sight of countless raptors slaughtered by gunners. His answer was combative conservationist Rosalie Edge, who bought and put off-limits to hunters what has since become a hawk-watching station. The National Audubon Society hired him in 1936.
When Pough identified the feather ornamenting his wife's new hat as that of a Golden Eagle, he turned feather detective and helped snuff out, during the 1940s, a resurgence of the trade in wild bird plumes. Later, he encouraged an amateur ornithologist, 58-year-old Charles Broley, to clamber as high as 115 feet and band more than 1,200 eagles. Pough spent two months in Louisiana's Singer Tract, monitoring a female Ivory-billed Woodpecker that was unable to find a mate. He was among the first to warn publicly of DDT's menace to wildlife.
Pough became chairman of the Department of Conservation and General Ecology of the American Museum of Natural History in 1948. When he learned that the federal government planned to sell Great Gull Island off New London, Connecticut, he persuaded the museum to buy the island, and it became, under director Helen Hays, a center of tern research. Later, he gave pep talks to Garden Club members on the value of conserving open space in suburbia and beyond.
Pough convinced the Ecologists' Union to change its name to the Nature Conservancy, then persuaded Lila A. Wallace, a founder of Reader's Digest, to establish a $100,000 revolving fund to allow quick action when desirable land became available. Pough served as the new organization's founding president from 1954 to 1956.
He went on to become a free-lance land preserver. Beguiled by his charm, landowners eventually turned over more than $15 million worth of property, at 1960s prices, to his groups. Conservationist Katharine Ordway sent millions his way and ensured the protection of land (notably underappreciated prairie tracts) all over the country.
Pough's wife, Moira, died in 1986; their son Edward died in 2000. He leaves two brothers, Frederick and Harold, a son Tristram, two daughters-in-law, and two grandchildren. He also leaves great stretches of unspoiled America—more acreage than even Dick Pough himself was able to calculate.
A longer memorial, with a portrait, appears in The Wilson Bulletin volume 115, pages 354–356.
