IN MEMORIAM: WILLIAM ALEXANDER CALDER III, 1934–2002

Abstract

The life of William Alexander Calder III was ended abruptly on 23 April 2002, by acute leukemia. The disease was diagnosed only a short time before his death and progressed rapidly. Bill Calder's entire life was fast-paced; his mind and body never seemed to stop in his efforts to reach mountaintops, to solve physiological questions, or to offer solutions to environmental problems for newspaper readers or rural residents of remote parts of Mexico. Bill was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 2 September 1934. At age 16, participation in field trips sponsored by the Atlanta Audubon Society led to an interest in bird watching. He acquired a distaste for collecting when a professor shot a Great Blue Heron but failed to prepare the specimen. After two years at Emory University and summers spent as a Forest Service smoke-jumper in Montana, he completed his BS degree in zoology from the University of Georgia in 1955. Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard, he became a pilot of twin-engined seaplanes, search and rescue operations and fish and wildlife patrols in Florida, Texas, and Washington. Graduate school took him to Washington State University where he studied Zebra Finch metabolism for an MS thesis (1963) under the guidance of James R. King, and then to Duke for a Ph.D. dissertation (1966) on roadrunner metabolism with Knut Schmidt-Nielsen. During that time, two summers were spent as a seasonal naturalist at Grand Teton National Park, where his interest in hummingbirds was initiated by a Calliope Hummingbird nest, and one summer as a rangernaturalist at Glacier National Park. After two years teaching at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, he moved to the University of Arizona at Tucson in 1969, becoming a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 1974. He joined the AOU in 1961, becoming an Elective Member in 1974, and a Fellow in 1988. Bill's earlier research publications concerned mainly water balance, respiration, and energetics of birds, but he published two papers on temperature relationships of the water shrew. In 1971 he spent the first of many summers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, Colorado. There he investigated physiological problems associated with small size, especially of hummingbirds. For the rest of his life, most of his research focused on hummingbirds; it resulted in many papers on their physiology, ecology, and behavior. A significant departure was a sabbatical in New Zealand in 1976-1977, where he studied kiwi physiology. His interest in tiny mammals, tiny birds, and big eggs (as in the kiwi) led him to question many established ideas about the relationship between size and function; he wrote Size, Function, and Life History (1984, Harvard University Press). He contributed chapters to a number of books, most on hummingbirds, matters of size, and conservation issues. Personal research with subsequent publication was not Bill's only goal; he was a dedicated teacher at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He wanted students to question what they saw and read and to learn to derive their own answers. He was irreverent of established rule and used provocative questions daily in his classroom. He transmitted the joy of doing science; his own work proved it could be fun. Theories were never lacking in his discussions; he could always offer a theory about anything. Many ideas were not productive, but others led to fruitful research. The University of Arizona College of Science honored him in 2002 with its Career Mentoring Award, in recognition of a lifetime of excellence in teaching. He left a compelling model on how to live and how to do science, described by one of his colleagues as equal parts of humor, keen observation, hard work, and absolute honesty. Bill's love of the outdoors was a compulsion; he liked nothing better than to climb the nearest high mountain. At RMBL, he often invited new students or colleagues to talk with him, but that involved bushwhacking to a nearby 13,000 ft (3,950 m) peak! His physiological ecology course was dubbed Backpacking 101. With his wife Lorene, he started graduate student seminars at which they would serve peppermint tea prepared on a wood burning stove and served in specimen jars. He was a regular participant in the 4th of July footrace, an eight mile (13 km) ordeal between Gothic and