What do you believe were the greatest accomplishments of the organization in the 50s and 60s?
This was a question we fielded to G. Frank Oatman, Jr, who was the president of Travis Audubon in the early 60s. (Oatman is 85 now and retired in New Mexico.)
Here are Oatman’s thoughts:
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Travis Audubon Society had no professional staff and depended entirely upon the volunteer work of officers and of various mem ber-staffed committees. The two most active of those were the Field Trip Com mittee and the Programs Committee. A Conservation Committee did some good work occasionally too. A Checklist Committee produced and later updated a printed list of bird species found in Travis County, a quite useful contribution.
I would say that the greatest impact of TAS publically then was hosting several Audubon Society Nature talks and screenings per year. These were provided by the National Audubon Society and involved the screening of a nature program (film without sound) with talks by the program’s maker/photographer. TAS adver tised those in our own newsletter (the ‘Signal Smoke’) and in the Austin American Statesman, and in a day when there were few to zero such programs on TV (and the internet with its offerings was not yet invented), these drew quite good audiences from the general public plus our own members. The TAS President normally introduced each auditorium talk/screening and of course invited per sons to join TAS and to attend our free field trips. The Program Committee arranged stays for the talk presenters in homes of members. That committee also worked with the TAS President to arrange the public monthly meetings of Travis Audubon, which sometimes included talks on a subject of interest (such as cur rent conservation issues) by members. We worked constantly to get more per sons to join and be involved with TAS and thus tried to make our monthly meetings interesting.
I was elected TAS President in 1961 I believe. During my term, I initiated an effort to preserve Westcave and surrounding land and led several field trips there with members, some potential major donors, and press folks. Preservation was not achieved during my presidency; but we got the ball rolling and a nature pre serve was happily created there in following years, still with active help of TAS. In those years TAS was invited to create a nature trail on the slope just above Mansfield Dam, and it was a frequent destination for our field trips for several years, though the public land’s managers later closed the trail.
The Field Trip Committee in those decades offered quite a few birding/nature trips per year, open without charge to our members and to the general public. Edgar B. Kincaid, Jr. and Fred S. Webster were our two most respected birders then, and they led a majority of our field trips in the 50s and 60s, which could be as local as Zilker Park and occasionally as far afield as Bastrop, all via private autos. I first got to know TAS by joining in the spring of 1958 a Kincaid-led morning birding trip in Zilker Park. John L. and Rose Ann Rowlett, brother and sister, were also on that trip, and it was the start of a wonderful friendship by three teens who became excellent birders; we three soon began to help on TAS field trips. Those TAS field trips were excellent introductions to birding and to nature in genera for many, and I think they were the single most important outreach and accomplishment of the Travis Audubon Society in the 1950s and 60s.
Thank you, Frank, for providing this insight into Travis Audubon’s past!
