Subject: NY Times obit: Luis F. Baptista
Date: Jun 19 08:06:57 2000
From: Li, Kevin - Kevin.Li at METROKC.GOV


An excerpt from the NY times:

June 17, 2000
Luis F. Baptista, 58, an Author and an Expert on Bird Song

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Luis F. Baptista, a leading expert on bird song who had
learned to recognize not just bird languages but also dialects and regional
accents, died on Monday at his home in Sebastopol, Calif. He was 58.

Dr. Baptista was tending to a wild barn owl that had moved
into a shed on his property when he collapsed, said his companion, Helen
Mary Horblit. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Dr. Baptista, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the
California Academy of Sciences, was the author of more than 176 papers and
the co-author with J. C. Welty of the widely used textbook The Life of
Birds. He had spent his life studying how different species of birds
developed their songs and calls.

"His knowledge of the living bird and its habits was more
comprehensive and sound than that of any other person," said the noted
philosopher and zoologist Dr. Ernst Mayr, a professor emeritus at Harvard
University. "He had the most precise, correct and reliable information on
what is innate and what is learned in bird song."

Though he studied dozens of different bird species, Dr.
Baptista was best known for his research into the habits of white-crowned
sparrows, which nest in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where the
California Academy of Sciences is based.

He could recite the personal stories and mating habits of
each of the park's white-crowned sparrows, and recognized the birds from
bandings, natural markings and songs.

Luis Filipe Baptista was born in Hong Kong on Aug. 9, 1941,
and grew up there and in Macao. His passion for birds began in the region.

"In Hong Kong, the top floor of teahouses was reserved for
bird lovers," he told a reporter for The New York Times in April. "You
brought your caged birds and drank tea and enjoyed their songs. My father
would take me and I loved it. Also, my brother and I would often go to the
countryside near where we lived to watch the wild birds. So when I came to
this country in the early 1960's and learned that there was such a thing as
ornithology, I thought, 'Good Lord, you can actually be paid to go out,
watch birds and study their songs.' "

He earned a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University
of San Francisco and a doctorate from the University of California at
Berkeley.

In 1972, he traveled to the Max Planck Institute for
Behavioral Physiology near Munich to study the chaffinch, a bird that makes
specific noises in response to different kinds of threats -- signs, Dr.
Baptista believed, of a kind of language.

"It has a vocabulary of 10, 12 different sounds," he
recently explained. "But it has different alarm calls.

There's one for the hawk flying overhead: 'This is not a
serious danger.' A different call means, 'Let's get the hell out of here.' "


He returned to the United States and joined the Moore
Laboratory of Zoology of Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he had the
opportunity to study the birds of Mexico and Central America. In 1980, he
became chairman of the department of ornithology and mammalogy at the
California Academy of Sciences.

In addition to Ms. Horblit, a keeper of nocturnal lemurs at
the Golden Gate Park Zoo, Dr. Baptista is survived by his mother, Thelma;
two brothers, Antonio and Gaspar, and a daughter, Laura.

"Luis was the Henry Higgins of the bird world," said Dr.
James Harris, an avian veterinarian for the California Academy of Sciences.
"He believed dialect was history. Luis could stand in the park, hear a call
and declare, 'That white-crowned had a Canadian father and a California
mother. It has half an Alberta accent and half a Monterey accent. The
parents probably met at the Tioga Pass near Yosemite.' "