Abbot S. Gaunt, known to his friends and colleagues as Toby, was born on Independence Day, 1936, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and died on 30 March 2006. After attending public school in Methuen, Massachusetts, and then Philips-Andover Academy, Toby graduated from Amherst College in 1958. (Toby and I once concluded, after much fruitless argument, that Amherst and Swarthmore conspire to hand back and forth the ranking as the top liberal arts college in the United States just to get their alums to dig deeper for annual contributions.)
Toby followed his life-long interest in animals by journeying west of the Appalachians to obtain his doctorate at the University of Kansas in 1963 (this despite his assertion that civilization ended at the western edge of Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts, and that far west only because Quabbin was the water source for Boston). His dissertation, Fossorial Adaptations in the Bank Swallow, Riparia riparia (Linnaeus), under the mentorship of Richard F. Johnston, was written after he decided that he did not want to revise the taxonomy of the shrews of North America under E. Raymond Hall. In addition, Toby's career direction was influenced by Jon Barlow, a friend and colleague at the University of Kansas; Carl Gans, with whom he completed his postdoctoral studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo, learning in the process that reptiles were not his top priority; and Ken Parkes, who introduced him to the Wilson Ornithological Society and remained his life-long friend.
Toby's SUNY postdoctoral studies followed a short-term appointment at Middlebury College, Vermont, during which he discovered that research was more important to him than teaching at the undergraduate level. From 1974 until assuming Emeritus status in 1996, Toby served as a pillar of the Zoology Department (now Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology) at The Ohio State University, where, during faculty meetings, he was particularly adept at using his encyclopedic knowledge of Robert's Rules of Order to bring to heel the flights of fancy of certain colleagues.
After his early work on adaptations for digging in Bank Swallows, Toby focused for many years on the anatomy and function of the avian syrinx in collaboration with his wife, Sandra L. L. Gaunt. Fueled by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic Society, the environs of his lab resonated with rooster crows and parrot squawks.
A Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Toby held several offices, including President of the Wilson Ornithological Society. He was editor, with Carl Gans, of the last volumes of the Biology of Reptilia and was completing the final volume at the time of his death. Those doing manipulative research with wild birds will be familiar with Guidelines for the Use of Wild Birds in Research, edited by Abbot S. Gaunt and Lewis W. Oring, the formulation of procedures now widely accepted by state and federal agencies and university institutional animal care and use committees.
Toby was an avid birder and maintained an extensive list of species in his neighborhood, in the process documenting the demise of avifauna by the Columbus sprawl. He was also a keen flyfisher and devoted flytyer, even stooping, in the troutless wastes of Ohio, to pursue bass, all the while recognizing that they were practically carp.
Toby cultivated the persona of an avuncular curmudgeon, often sporting an ascot or bolas at parties. During the first lecture of his course in Comparative Anatomy, he would gaze across the sea of beady-eyed pre-meds before him and suggest they all look at their classmates to the left and right because “by the end of the course, one of you three won't be here!” He was a lively-minded master raconteur who had difficulty maintaining his curmudgeonly mien with his many colleagues and friends. My wife, Jill, remembers Toby as someone who made a point of seeking her out at social gatherings for comments on literature from her perspective as a high school English teacher. He was one of a diminishing number of Renaissance scholars rapidly being replaced in science by narrowminded technocrats.
The last of his line, Toby is survived by Sandy, his wife and closest professional colleague, and by all of us who miss him. I thank Sandy and Jay Sheppard for their assistance in preparing this article.
