Conservation History Association of Texas
Texas Legacy Project
Oral History Interview
Nature Conservancy in Texas

Interviewee: Victor Emanuel
Date: June 14, 2022
Site: Austin, Texas
Reels: 3743-3744
Executive Producer: Lydia Saldana
Producer: Jeff Weigel
Field Producer / Chief Interviewer: Lee Smith
Videographer: Curtis Craven
Writer / Editor: Ron Kabele
Transcriber: David Todd / Trint
Item: Emanuel_Victor_NCItem8_AustinTX_20220614_Reel3743-3744_Audio.mp3

[Bracketed numbers refer to the time code for the interview recording.]

Lee Smith [00:00:16] So where did you grow up?

Victor Emanuel [00:00:18] I grew up in Houston, right near downtown, just southeast of downtown. But in those days, there were vacant lots everywhere, filled with blackberries and boards that you could turn over and find a snake. And there were ditches that had crawfish in them and had turtles in them. So even though I was right in the city, nature was all around me.

Lee Smith [00:00:38] What about the bayou? Did you get down the bayou? The Bayou runs right through downtown.

Victor Emanuel [00:00:43] No, I got to the bayou only in Hermann Park. We would walk to Hermann Park. It’s about 10 or 15 blocks from my house. And the bayou was there. And there also, we saw birds and animals in Hermann Park, and the zoo was there.

Lee Smith [00:00:58] And so where did you go to high school and college?

Lee Smith [00:01:02] Well, I went to Bellaire High School, which just had opened. I was the first class that went to all grades, all the years that you’re supposed to be there. And then I went to college at Rice and then to the University of Texas and then to Harvard. So and I changed from biology to government because I realized that my interest in birds was more the esthetic side in appreciating them, but not studying them.

Lee Smith [00:01:31] So a degree in government from Harvard. What did you do after Harvard?

Victor Emanuel [00:01:38] What did I do? Well, that’s an interesting story because of how the forks in the road in people’s lives. I came back to Houston to do research on my dissertation. I had finished everything except the dissertation, all the requirements to get a Ph.D.

[00:01:52] And my father said there’s a young man who grew up in the same block in Houston that you did who was a little older than you and just kind of took you and your friends around on walks and talked to you and helped you, who’s moved back to Houston with his wife and daughters and is running for the school board and you might want to reconnect with him.

Victor Emanuel [00:02:14] Well, I thought it would be nice to see George and meet his wife. And I went out and had dinner with him. And then it’s interesting in life, like these questions I get asked. George said to me, “Victor, I know you’ve been involved in political campaigns.” I’d worked for Ralph Yarborough when he was running for governor. “Would you run my campaign?”.

Victor Emanuel [00:02:34] I said, because I very care very much about education, and he’s a good friend. I said, “Yes.” And there went seven years of my life trying to improve the Houston schools. Because he ran, we got a lot of professional people involved that had moved to Houston, cared about education. Ran a wonderful campaign. He was running against an incumbent, a woman on the board named Mrs. Cullen, not related to the famous Cullens, but she never said a thing at the board meeting. She was there, just as they say, furniture.

Victor Emanuel [00:03:04] And he ran against her. And in the election he had say 47% and she had 49%. And neither had a majority, but a third party, another person, had the other percent, the other votes.

Victor Emanuel [00:03:23] So the school board met. They said we’ll have a runoff between Mrs. Cullen and this other person, not George, because because he was not properly registered. He registered under a provision that if you move to Houston within a year of the election, you could register any time you wanted to. But he had moved 15 months before the election. He didn’t qualify under that rule of being able to register late.

Victor Emanuel [00:03:51] But the district attorney, or not the district attorney, the county clerk said, “Well, we’ll let the voters decide.” So they didn’t throw him off the ballot. The school board wanted him taken off the ballot, but he was on the ballot. And as I say, he was taken off the runoff. And so Mrs. Cullen did win reelection.

Victor Emanuel [00:04:11] So I had the idea, along with other people, to start an organization called Citizens for Good Schools. And we had several hundred people join that had worked for us. And the idea was that the next time there was election, we would run four candidates. The board has a seven-member board. And we would therefore have a majority on the board. And we did. And we won.

Victor Emanuel [00:04:33] But anyway, it went on and on and on, involvement with the schools and with the running of the schools.

Victor Emanuel [00:04:38] I never got involved with the schools in terms of nature, which was my big passion. Now I have an idea that I want to do that will involve me with nature and kids at this part of my life.

Victor Emanuel [00:04:55] But that’s what I did after I got out of Harvard. So I never did the dissertation. I just did that.

Victor Emanuel [00:05:02] And interesting the phone calls you have in your life. I called the professor who was who was supposed to be overseeing my dissertation. And I said after … I went up to get my master’s degree. They give you that as a kind of a goodbye thing. And I went to pick up my master’s degree. And I went by to see James Wilson, the famous professor who had been one of my teacher who was now head of the department.

Victor Emanuel [00:05:25] And in a moment of why I did this, I said, “Dr. Wilson, can I have another try at a dissertation? And you would be my director?” He said, “I would be delighted to.” I was flattered that James Wilson would be my overseer of my dissertation.

Victor Emanuel [00:05:42] I went back to Houston. More involvement in school board politics, more involvement in other things. Never. He never heard from me.

Victor Emanuel [00:05:49] So I called him. I said, “Dr. Wilson, I’m terribly sorry. But I will I will get something to you.”

Victor Emanuel [00:05:55] He said, “Victor, clearly you don’t want to do this. Why are you beating yourself up?” He said, “You will have a successful life regardless of what you do because of your interest in a lot of different things.”

Victor Emanuel [00:06:10] And I said, “Thank you so for telling me that.” And Dr. Wilson said, “The best way to give advice to people that they will follow is tell them something they want to hear.” And that was what I wanted to hear.

Victor Emanuel [00:06:24] So, then I got involved in, you know, the school board. It’s interesting the little things that come off of it, because we had a Kennedy in our slate, a minister, an African-American minister that we didn’t know. But once he announced, nobody would run against and we couldn’t get another African-American person that was more involved in education.

Victor Emanuel [00:06:45] So he was our candidate and he had a headquarters. But the man running his headquarters often didn’t come. The door was locked.

Victor Emanuel [00:06:53] So I said, “Reverend Everett, I have a friend that I think would be a good campaign manager. And his name is Mickey Leland.” And that’s how I got Mickey Leland involved in politics. He became one of my best friends.

Victor Emanuel [00:07:08] And but I never got him involved in nature. I have a kind of an interesting story to tell about this. We were very close friends and I said we’d have dinner. I said, “Mickey, after we have dinner (at Luby’s, usually), why don’t we go for a hike in Memorial Park?” “Go for a hike in the park? There’ll be snakes. I don’t want to go out in nature. There are all these snakes around.”

Victor Emanuel [00:07:29] I think that’s true of some people that grow up in the ghetto. They’re worried about things like that, they didn’t know about. I said, “Mickey, you know, I’ve never seen a snake in Memorial Park.” So we go for a walk and I’m leading the way and I’m in front of Mickey and I’m walking along and Mickey says, “Victor, you just stepped over a snake.” So that was my only hike with Mickey.

Victor Emanuel [00:07:50] We elected all four people. We had a majority on the board, and we brought in a new superintendent who became the mayor of Georgetown. He died about three years ago. Wonderful man, George Garver. And then one of the members of our group defected to the other side for various reasons, and he was fired because we didn’t have four votes anymore. But he stayed in Houston. And the next election, we elected more people and he got back on and he ran the schools.

Victor Emanuel [00:08:21] And we started the first community college in Houston. And we also worked on integration because there’d just been Brown versus Board of Education. And George Garver was the superintendent. The assistant superintendent was an African-American man whose name I’m blanking out on. He became the head of a community college when we started one.

Victor Emanuel [00:08:46] The other thing we did that I was very proud of, we started the first magnet schools, the High School for the Performing Arts, the High School for the Medical Arts. There had never been those in Houston. And it brought people from all over the city. So that was a form of integration.

Lee Smith [00:09:02] So how did you start birdwatching at such an early age? What was it, eight?

Victor Emanuel [00:09:06] Really about probably even earlier. My mother threw out seeds in the backyard under the fig tree in the backyard. And a male cardinal came and I saw it. And I’d never seen such a beautiful creature.

Victor Emanuel [00:09:22] And then I was walking to school right after that. And right next to me in a little bush was this black and white little bird. It was a chickadee. Almost close enough that I could touch it. And that just … birds became a big part of my life.

Victor Emanuel [00:09:36] But really, the key thing was that, again, there are these forks in the road. I was in the Cub Scouts and one of my colleagues in the Cub Scouts, another young man said, “Victor, you need to join the Outdoor Nature Club, which was a affiliate of National Audubon, and there’ll be more of what you’re interested in.”

Victor Emanuel [00:09:57] It was in the library downtown, the old library. And my parents took me. I’ll never forget going in the room. And there were like 50 people, all of them very old, for me, I was like eight, nine. I was like nine.

Victor Emanuel [00:10:10] And there, I met my two wonderful mentors. And I love the word mentor because it comes from Ulysses and from Homer.

Victor Emanuel [00:10:20] When Ulysses went to Troy, he left the care of his son Telemachus, in the care of a man named Mentor to take care of his son because he was gone for, you know, like 20 years. And so later on in Greek life, ancient Greece, when you saw someone helping a young person, you said you’re like Mentor. You are a mentor. Like you’re another Mentor.

Victor Emanuel [00:10:47] Well, anyway, I met Armand Yramategui. Wonderful last name – Yramategui. It’s Basque.

Victor Emanuel [00:10:53] And Joe Heiser. And Joe Heiser had been the head of the club. He was a great conservationist, and he was one of those people that saw the need to do things to help save wild things and birds and animals and trees.

Victor Emanuel [00:11:11] And he saw that the Big Thicket was being radically changed by tree farms. Instead of a variety of trees, they were all pine trees. They would grow fast and get cut down, and they’d had more pine trees.

Victor Emanuel [00:11:23] So he worked for, he worked for Texaco as an accountant. He was high up in Texaco. And he had saved his money. He lived with his siblings. He didn’t get married. His father had been head of the Houston Parks Board, I think, for years. So he had a background in conservation of parks.

Victor Emanuel [00:11:42] So Joe had the idea that we needed to buy some land north of Houston in East Texas, like 500 or 1000 acres, and reseed it with the trees that had been cut down, recreate the little, they called it the Little Thicket Nature Sanctuary that Joe created. And I would go with him with a friend on weekends to help plant trees and scatter seeds and bring back the Big Thicket in that patch of land.

Victor Emanuel [00:12:10] So that was my mentor. That was what I was exposed to right away.

Victor Emanuel [00:12:14] And he knew every bird song. And my favorite story about Joe: he would be in his cabin or a tent or whatever he had sleeping by himself there. I would be camping with a friend. And he’d be sound asleep. He wouldn’t be waking up early and birds would be singing. All of a sudden, he’d hear a bird that he hadn’t heard before, an unusual bird, and he’d wake up right away. So his mind was processing bird sounds even while he was asleep. And he was phenomenal at identifying that’s this bird, that’s this bird, that’s that bird, and plants and everything.

Victor Emanuel [00:12:49] And he and Armand (his parents were from Mexico). His father was from southern Mexico, central Mexico, was Basque and his mother was from Monterey. And they had met in Houston, got married and had a couple of kids. And Armand was an all-around naturalist, too.

Victor Emanuel [00:13:07] And I was so fortunate that my mentors were people that were all-around naturalists. They weren’t just interested in birds and they weren’t, as we have many people now, “Well let’s find this bird because it would be new for me. I’ve never seen it.”.

Victor Emanuel [00:13:21] They liked everything. It didn’t matter if you’d seen it before. Just look at it and enjoy it. And they did.

Victor Emanuel [00:13:27] There were some very special birds. There’s a bird called the worm-eating warbler. Kind of an odd name that is only found in a few parts of East Texas. And they found it on the Little Thicket Nature Sanctuary, and I got to see it. So that was very special, seeing a very unusual warbler there, that’s not very common.

Victor Emanuel [00:13:46] But they were these wonderful mentors and they were great conservationists.

Victor Emanuel [00:13:50] And they started the Nature Conservancy before Texas Nature Conservancy was created because they saw what was happening and they looked for plots of land that were threatened.

Victor Emanuel [00:14:03] And one I remember particularly. It’s coming back to me. It was a bog, a wetland area, north of Koontz that had pitcher plants, sundew. And it was threatened. It was going to be all cut down and changed.

Victor Emanuel [00:14:17] So they raised the money. And thanks to his connections with Texaco, he knew the three daughters of Joe Cullinan, who had started Texaco, and they, being the daughters of Joe Cullinan, were able to make large contributions in there with their money.

Victor Emanuel [00:14:35] And the three daughters were, I have to, I can remember their names. I knew them. There was Nina Cullinan and there was there was Nina Cullinan. And there was Margaret Wray. She was a Cullinan. But her married name was Margaret Wray. And Mary Cravens. And they had the nickname, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.

Victor Emanuel [00:15:01] And they were the first people I knew about that had the considerable means that did a lot for conservation. And that was thanks to Joe Heiser and Texaco. And so they saved significant parts of land before Nature Conservancy was even created or thought of.

Victor Emanuel [00:15:20] And those were, he was my mentor, Joe.

Victor Emanuel [00:15:22] And as I say, the, and we bought the land north of Houston, 100, 500 acres at $30 an acre. He paid for it with his money from Texaco, and he sold it to the Outdoor Nature Club at the price he had paid for it. And they could pay it out over years with no interest. Just get a little bit of money back for what he had put in. Extraordinary man.

Victor Emanuel [00:15:51] And so was Armand. Armand was a great, great conservationist and was particularly interested in astronomy, and sadly was killed when his car broke down and people stopped to help him and robbed him and killed him on the Southwest Parkway. He was going out to see a comet or something. And that was one of the worst things in my life when my mentor, Armand, got killed. And there was actually a story in the editorial page about him, about Armand.

Victor Emanuel [00:16:23] And Armand also, besides, like Joe, he appreciated everything, but he had this incredible enthusiasm, which I think I already had, but he certainly augmented it because he wouldn’t say there’s a bird called the vermillion flycatcher. It’s a beautiful red flycatcher. He wouldn’t say, “Look over there, there’s a vermillion flycatcher.” He says, “Look, there is a vermilion flycatch!”

Victor Emanuel [00:16:47] And it’s interesting because I was told that the name, Yramategui, is what you say in the Basque country when you get to the top of a mountain, instead of saying, “Wonderful”, you say “Yramategui!” And that was his last name. And that’s the way he was. And he was my mentor.

Victor Emanuel [00:17:04] Both he and Joe were my mentors. And that’s how I got, you know, I was so fortunate.

Victor Emanuel [00:17:08] And at the Outdoor Nature Club, I met a wonderful woman from Minneapolis who was interested in botany. And these older people were very nice at helping a young person like me, all of the ones in the club. And I was in that club for years, you know, for probably, until I went away to college.

Lee Smith [00:17:26] So. You’re back in Houston and you’re involved in all these school board elections and stuff. But you still had birding in you. So how. How did that eclipse or or when did the shift come?

Victor Emanuel [00:17:52] Well, the interesting thing about being involved in campaigns, I was running Mike Andrew’s campaign for Congress and I was in an office down on the Gulf Freeway. In my little office, I was running the campaign, and not really enjoying it that much. I really wanted to get out of politics.

Victor Emanuel [00:18:08] And all of a sudden, I’m at my desk and I hear, “Bob White. Bob White. Bob White.” I thought, what is going on? I walk around the building and a bobwhite quail is sitting on a post right next to my wall of my office, and it was like it was calling me back into nature.

Victor Emanuel [00:18:28] Well, what happened … was just again I am fascinated at the forks in the road in people’s lives. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was working at an urban city center. I didn’t really enjoy that that much.

Victor Emanuel [00:18:39] And then I was rooming with some friends and I had one room in a house they had rented near Rice when you could afford to rent houses around there. But I had one room in their house. And someone called their phone. Somehow they had gotten their, my phone number. It was the same phone. And they said, “There’s someone on the line for you.”

Victor Emanuel [00:18:59] And I went and it was this man who was a banker who was, this is about 1970, who was coming to Houston for a banking convention.

Victor Emanuel [00:19:11] And he said, “I’m coming to Houston for this banking convention. If I paid you $100, would you take me and my sister out birding?” He had gotten my name from the manager of the wildlife refuge at the Attwater, I mean the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. It had just been created, that refuge, and I got to know the man who was the first director. Wonderful, wonderful man.

Victor Emanuel [00:19:39] And this guy had called the refuge and said, “Do you people at the Refuge know anyone that might take me and my sister out birding?” And he gave them my name and phone number.

Victor Emanuel [00:19:47] So I did. And it made me think, “Well, maybe I could make a living taking people out birding.” And I took people out for a number of years like him. 1 or 2 people. And interesting about when you don’t know anything about business, and you start a business, what I charged people for going out birding was $14 a day and $0.14 a mile of every mile I put on my car, which was the cost of a rental car. So I was valuing myself at zero. All they were paying for was a car. But I made a little money. But that wasn’t a good way to have a profession.

Victor Emanuel [00:20:25] And then again, forks in the road. I got a phone call from a guy in New Orleans. He says the National Audubon Society is going to have its convention, national convention, in New Orleans for the first time. And the local chapter is in charge of providing the pre and post convention field trips – and trips, not just a field trip – like a week. People do something before the convention.

Victor Emanuel [00:20:48] He said, “We’re thinking of bringing a group over to Galveston, if we did.” And he had gotten my name from a woman who had moved from Houston to New Orleans. That’s how he happened to call me. And he said, “If we did that, would you be a local leader for a day?”

Victor Emanuel [00:21:03] Now, one thing that I think has helped me is thinking, having ideas and thinking maybe somewhat big. I said, I’m forgetting his name. I said, “I’d be happy to do that, but I have a better idea. Why don’t you offer the people in addition to that trip, trips to Yucatan? It’s so close to New Orleans where they could see the Mayan ruins and tropical birds and animals and plants. And I’d be the organizer.”

Victor Emanuel [00:21:30] Numbers of people would say, we’re not doing that because we don’t want to take people to Mexico. He and his wife had been to Mexico, through the Yucatan, and loved it. He said, “That’s a great idea. Organize the trips.”

Victor Emanuel [00:21:41] Those were my first groups, thanks to that phone call. And then we had full groups, you know, about 15 people in each group, before and after the convention, and went to all the Mayan ruins and everything.

Victor Emanuel [00:21:54] And then after that, I thought, “I’ll start a company.” But I also … all your ideas aren’t necessarily ones that work out because I had become friends with the mayor of Houston, because his father was Fred Hofheinz. His father was a good friend of mine. I guess his father was Fred, and now the son was mayor. And I knew some of the people that helped him get elected who had worked in the school board thing campaign.

Victor Emanuel [00:22:19] And I thought, well, maybe these people attending the convention. This was a crazy idea. Would like to go out and see nature while they’re here in Houston. They could go out to see geese and they could see birds and they could see the landscape.

Victor Emanuel [00:22:33] And I contacted people I knew in the mayor’s office, and they agreed to put a little packet in the packets of the wives of the people who were attending. Again, it was thought, you know, the men are going to be busy with a meeting. And I went on some kind of trip and I told my answering service, you may get a lot of phone calls, but don’t be surprised. You make a lot of phone calls from people who want to get in touch with me. I came back. No one had called.

Victor Emanuel [00:23:00] All they want to do, go shopping in Houston, go to antique stores, visit with friends. Nobody wanted to go out to see nature. I actually designed a little booklet for it. The first little publication I’d ever designed. It was a was a complete flop.

Victor Emanuel [00:23:14] But I kept going and created Victor Emanuel Nature Tours.

Victor Emanuel [00:23:19] And the interesting thing is when I gave it a title, I did it Victor Emanuel, because the advertising agency that I had worked with on the school board campaigns, who were going to help us put together a little booklet, said you should put “Victor Emanuel” because there have been some articles about you and your bird count in national publications and that will help you get some response. It wasn’t an ego thing. I’m happy it’s Victor Emanuel, but nature came out of my mentors. Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, not just Victor Emanuel Birding Tours.

Victor Emanuel [00:23:51] And we have about 15 leaders. We do about 150 trips a year, and our leaders are all general, generalists. There’s a butterfly, there’s a lizard, there’s a snake, there’s a bird there. They’re generalists. And that is a thing that came out of my mentors.

Lee Smith [00:24:07] What is it about birds that fascinates people?

Victor Emanuel [00:24:15] They fly. They appear in your life unexpectedly, all of a sudden, flying over. “Oh, look, there’s a goose flying over. There’s a group of kites flying over. Or beautiful cormorants. I don’t know what they are.” But these things, they appear in your life.

Victor Emanuel [00:24:29] And other animals do, too. Like turtles. But they’re down on the ground in the weeds or something. I love them.

Victor Emanuel [00:24:34] But birds present themselves to you. They, they are more in your world. And then you learn about them. You learn about their incredible lives, their migrations. Some of them, some of them migrate 5 or 10,000 miles across the ocean.

Victor Emanuel [00:24:50] And, you know, but as I say, number one, they can fly and they have some of them have these brilliant colors. And I think that’s mainly what fascinates people.

Victor Emanuel [00:25:02] And the songs, of course. You hear them.

Victor Emanuel [00:25:05] And the first poem ever written in the English language that survived in old English is “Summer is a coming in, louder sing cuckoo.” The bird that says “cuckoo”. And that was the first poem that’s preserved. There are probably earlier ones.

Victor Emanuel [00:25:28] And Beethoven, my favorite composer, he put the cuckoo in the Eighth Symphony, the Pastoral. You hear the cuckoo. You hear a, not the cuckoo itself, but an imitation of the cuckoo.

Victor Emanuel [00:25:42] So and then two of the best songs, the best poems ever written, are “Ode to a Nightingale”, which is kind of sad and beautiful. One of the most famous poems ever written by Keats.

Victor Emanuel [00:25:56] And I recently discovered “The Lark” by Shelley, Shelley’s poem “Song of The Lark”.

Victor Emanuel [00:26:05] And recently, someone on a tour told me about a wonderful (I love classical music) a piece of music called “The Lark Ascending” by Vaughan Williams.

Victor Emanuel [00:26:16] And so the songs of birds have fascinated people, birds, their flight, their migrations.

Victor Emanuel [00:26:22] And there are all these other animals are wonderful, too, like wildebeest. But also they’re all around us. You’re not going to see a wildebeest every day. You are going to see a bird every day. If you have, if you open your eyes. They’re all around us.

Victor Emanuel [00:26:35] And and that’s one of my – slogan isn’t the right word – is I don’t know what I have on my gravestone is, “Beauty is all around us”.

Victor Emanuel [00:26:47] But unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t seeing it because they’re on their phone. They’re looking at their phone. They’re not looking.

Victor Emanuel [00:26:55] Clouds. Clouds are free. You don’t even need binoculars to see them. Binoculars cost, now, fortunately the price has dropped to about $200 for good binoculars. Really, really good ones are like 2000. But clouds, You don’t need binoculars. And they’re changing all the time. They’re moving and they’re part of our life. And yet there’s a cloud appreciation society in England that one of our clients signed me up for. But I haven’t really maintain my membership, but I just like looking at them.

Victor Emanuel [00:27:22] But my, one of my mentors, my slogans is “Beauty is all around us. If we will open our eyes.”

Victor Emanuel [00:27:28] And I had a rather interesting and not upsetting experience, there was a woman who started a magazine in Travis Heights where I live, and she asked me to write a column every other month or something about nature. And it went on for a few years and then the magazine folded.

Victor Emanuel [00:27:47] But she asked me to take her out on a nature walk and she was going to invite some other people. Only one other person came, that was a subscriber that she knew.

Victor Emanuel [00:27:56] And so we walked down to the lake from my house to Lady Bird Lake, and there weren’t that many birds to show them there. But we saw a few things. And we were walking back.

Victor Emanuel [00:28:07] And one thing I inherited from my father, besides my interest in history and politics, and particularly ancient Greece, is an interest in the University of Texas football because he was the sportswriter for UT, for the Daily Texan. And so I wanted to get back to my house to go to a football game and end the walk that I’d made with these ladies who were walking toward my house.

Victor Emanuel [00:28:29] And one of them says, “Look at this spider web up here, look at that big spider web high up in that tree near your house.” I went almost to my house. I look up and the light was hitting the spider web. And the angle where it was green and gold and red, because the the web acted like a prism. And I put my telescope on it. And they spotted it, not me. This woman spotted it. She had to look up. “There is this spider web!”

Victor Emanuel [00:28:59] And I went back and saw it for several days and also saw the spider after it, something flies into the web. It goes and wraps more stuff around it. And then it takes it out of the web. And it flies out with the thing and does like what you do with it, where you go down a cliff and you have something like that. Anyway, it gets it back up to store it to eat it later.

Victor Emanuel [00:29:25] But anyway I saw these things about the spider I hadn’t seen right near my house because this lady said, “Look at that big spider web.”

Victor Emanuel [00:29:32] But anyway, my point is, not to overdo it – beauty is all around us. You just have to open your eyes. There are clouds, there are flowers. There’re spiders. There’re lizards. There’re birds. It’s all around us. And it’s, it’s really in nature, broadly conceived.

Victor Emanuel [00:29:51] And I just did a tour to Greece, which I love. My sixth tour there. And I loved it because my father’s input on the classics. And we had the most remarkable man since I’ve been doing tours now for 45 years we’ve ever had in 45 years of tours. And I’m very impressed with people that deal with adversity and problems in their life. This guy has muscular dystrophy. He was on the tour with his wife. He had worked for Bat Conservation Association for 40 years, but he now walks with a very small gait. He’s a fairly big man. But, I mean, he can get around, but it’s not like it used to be able to.

Victor Emanuel [00:30:35] But it hasn’t changed his attitude. He’s out there with us on this tour of Greece. “Look at that lizard! Look, it’s got red under the throat! Oh, that’s. We haven’t seen that lizard before!” And a few minutes later. “Oh, there’s this flower.” He knew every plant, every bush, everything. He had all these books with him. But his enthusiasm was like Armand Yramategui that I had seen about everything he saw.

Victor Emanuel [00:31:02] “You know, that’s, that’s like pistachio. But it’s not a pistachio. It’s a related species to pistachio!” “Oh, my God. That that firecrest. It’s just sitting there, preening. I can’t believe we’re getting such a beautiful look.” It’s a little bird called a firecrest at the end of our trip. The enthusiasm was extraordinary. And everybody could be like him, if they would open their eyes.

Lee Smith [00:31:29] What is this Freeport bird count and why is that important?

Victor Emanuel [00:31:34] Well, it was in the early days. It started in 1900. One of the great naturalists, Frank Chapman of Bird-Lore, decided that at Christmas time people had a game where they went out and killed as many birds and animals as they could, and you counted the number you killed and then you won the competition. That was the Christmas competition, shooting competition.

Victor Emanuel [00:31:57] Well, this guy again, I’m 81, I’m not remembering his name right now, George. I know his books. Thought we’ll start a bird count. Instead of killing birds, counting. It’ll be people, another game people can do on Christmas. And it caught on about 1900 and it’s still going.

Victor Emanuel [00:32:16] And I went on some when I was ten. Was my first one, that one near Houston and saw my first vermilion flycatcher and a lot of ducks. And the idea of the bird count was a substitute for the killing of the birds, of the animals and birds, but also to gather data. How many cardinals did you see last year? You had 30 and now you have only five. Something is going on with the cardinals.

Victor Emanuel [00:32:43] And it’s very dramatic now. And of course, we’ve been, man has been having a negative effect on birds and wildlife and nature ever since the time of the ancient Greeks. In fact, there’s a very eloquent speech about that in Antigone, one of my favorite plays, about what man has done to nature.

Victor Emanuel [00:32:59] Anyway, the bird count. That was the idea. And again, my mentor Armand and I were driving around one day and he’s says, “Someone should start a bird count in the Freeport area,” because the only one was in the Baytown area, east of Houston. “Someone should start a bird count at Freeport because there are lots of birds there, and there marshes and there is the Gulf. And it would be an interesting place to do a bird count.”

Victor Emanuel [00:33:21] I heard it. It went in my head and I did it. And over the years, it got more and more and more and more birds, more people coming on it. The number we saw went up, up, up.

Victor Emanuel [00:33:31] And in about two, what year would that have been? We set the record for the most ever seen on a bird count in the history of the bird counts at Freeport, where Armand had said I should start the bird count. And it it’s been broken now by another count for the South. But we set the record.

Victor Emanuel [00:33:50] And because of that, again the forks in the road in people’s lives, because of that. Armand, I mean, Peter Matthieson, the writer, was having lunch with his oldest and closest friend, George Plimpton. And Peter said to George, “You’ve done all these wild things like box Archie Moore,” things like, to be participatory journalism, it’s called. He developed it really. “Why don’t you go on a bird count?” And he’d been interested in birds since he was a kid. His parents took him to Florida.

Victor Emanuel [00:34:21] And so George liked the idea. So he called the editor of Audubon magazine, Les Line, who was this wonderful, wonderful editor and said, “I want to go on a bird count, write about it, what it’s like being an amateur on a bird count.” And Les thought that’s a great idea.

Victor Emanuel [00:34:34] So Les called me because we had had the record-breaking count. That’s why I got the phone call and said, “We want to send George Plimpton on your count. Is that okay?” And I said, “Fine.”.

Victor Emanuel [00:34:45] So he came on the count and went with me. There were teams and he was on my team. And we just hit it off. We just really liked each other. And he said during the count, “I want you to meet my oldest friend, Peter Matthiesen.” He didn’t say my most long-time friend. Oldest. Well I looked at I just read his wonderful book, “The Tree Where Man was Born” and it’s dedicated to his late wife. And it had listed about ten books he’s written.

Victor Emanuel [00:35:21] Is that my phone?

Victor Emanuel [00:35:22] I’m sorry.

Victor Emanuel [00:35:24] To finish that story, George said, “I thought he’s written all these books and his wife is dead. I better get up and meet him while he’s still around.”.

Victor Emanuel [00:35:34] So my friend John Rell and I went up to meet him and stayed with George to meet Peter. And they had a dinner party. And I go in the room and here is this relatively young man and his beautiful girlfriend. “Who is that?” Well, it’s Peter. He meant the person I had known the longest. They’d known since kindergarten, my most long-time friend.

Victor Emanuel [00:35:58] And so Peter invited anyone who wanted to go out to his place at the end of Long Island after the dinner to spend the weekend and that developed that friendship. And that helped me in terms of starting the company.

Victor Emanuel [00:36:11] But the bird count led to me meeting George, and George led to me meeting Peter, and then Peter made many, many trips with us in all the continents. Peter and I went to all the continents together and wrote books about his trips as well as all those other wonderful books.

Victor Emanuel [00:36:28] One of the wonderful ones I just read is The Ends of the Earth. Because he went with us to Antarctica, both from the South American side and from the Australian side. We went to both sides of Antarctica. So that all came out of the bird count. So that’s the bird count.

Lee Smith [00:36:45] And and why Freeport? Was it just because Armand?

Victor Emanuel [00:36:52] Armand put his finger on it. Because it’s got a national wildlife refuge. I don’t know if it did then. It has the Brazoria National Wildlife area. It has beaches, it has the ocean, it has jetties that go out into the ocean. It has undeveloped land, then undeveloped, and the Brazos river, and the forest along the Brazos River.

Lee Smith [00:37:16] And it’s right at the Coastal Bend. Isn’t it, kind of?

Victor Emanuel [00:37:19] No. Yeah. It’s the beginning of the Coastal Bend. If you think of coming down. Yeah, it’s at the beginning of it.

Lee Smith [00:37:26] So does the pattern hit that?

Victor Emanuel [00:37:31] No, no. It’s just that there are a lot of birds spending the winter there because of the food and the habitat.

Victor Emanuel [00:37:37] And so tell me about the work you’ve done with the golden-cheeked warbler.

Victor Emanuel [00:37:43] Well, I personally have not really done any work with the golden-cheeked warbler. It’s one of the birds I most wanted to see. And I have friends like David Braun and and Chuck Sexton that have done a lot of work with it, but I haven’t personally done any work with the golden-cheeked warbler.

Lee Smith [00:38:02] Is your book?

Victor Emanuel [00:38:05] “One More Warbler” talks about warblers in general. Of all the different 55 different kinds of warblers, my favorite is the hooded warbler that I grew up with in East Texas at the Little Thicket Nature Sanctuary. That’s such a strikingly beautiful warbler.

Victor Emanuel [00:38:20] But my main concern, and this is where Nature Conservancy has made such a difference and has a lot more to do, is habitat protection.

Victor Emanuel [00:38:29] There was an interesting article in the New York Times today about how birdsong is getting people interested in birds and they’re hearing birds. And because of the Covid times they’re getting it. That’s important.

Victor Emanuel [00:38:39] But the important thing is to identify areas that need to be preserved here, but also where the birds spend the winter.

Victor Emanuel [00:38:47] And a good example, and I’m not an expert on the details of this, there’s a wonderful warbler called the magnolia warbler, that’s yellow with black stripes on its breast. It breeds up in Canada and the northern United States. And thanks to the records that are being submitted by eBird, we know that almost all of them go to Belize.

Victor Emanuel [00:39:07] Well, the Mormons have cut down all the brush, all the forest, to plant crops. So the habitat for the magnolia warbler has just shrunk. So we need some conservation group, could be the Nature Conservancy, could be others, to buy a thousand acres, 10,000 acres.

Victor Emanuel [00:39:26] And the nice thing about the tropics. It comes back quickly. The seeds are being spread by other animals and birds. And if you bought 10,000 acres of habitat in Belize where these warblers and painted bunting go, it would restore itself. But that’s my main concern.

Victor Emanuel [00:39:44] And that was the main concern of E.O. Wilson, who unfortunately I never got to meet. He wanted half the world, I think, he said to be, you know, protected.

Lee Smith [00:39:54] Now I think of, you know, teal and and geese and cranes as being these hyper migrators. I mean, you know, teal are kind of built like a jet. But a warbler? You’re telling me a warbler goes, is, you know, I mean, I thought they were more local. I mean, to tell me about.

Victor Emanuel [00:40:18] Well, those birds do migrate. Not as far as warblers do. Warblers, all they need insects in the winter, so they need to go, most of them, down further south into Mexico and Central America, where there are insects that they can eat.

Victor Emanuel [00:40:32] And the warblers really came from there because when North America was under ice, most of North America was under ice, there were no places for warblers, anything to breed. And they and these birds, like warblers, were breeding in the tropics. And then as the ice receded, they started moving north, because here is new areas to breed in where there won’t be any competition from other animals or birds. And so the warblers and as they moved north, they evolved into different colors and different species.

Victor Emanuel [00:41:01] But Roger Tory Peterson felt the same way as I do about warblers. He called them the butterflies of the bird world because they’re so colorful,. And many other people feel like I do about it. At the wonderful, the Houston Audubon Sanctuary at High Island, where they have a list of birds seen every day when you check in. It has warblers. And then all the other birds listed.

Victor Emanuel [00:41:26] So, many people feel like I do because they just appear before you for a moment and you have to be good at seeing them because they can get in among the leaves. And so the fact that it takes effort means you feel even more rewarded when they’re right in front of you.

[00:41:44] Now, Theodore Roosevelt stopped a cabinet meeting to go out and look at a Blackburnian warbler, which I asked Peter Mattheisen toward the end of his life what was his favorite warbler? And he said the Blackburnian. But he interrupted a cabinet meeting to look at it.

Victor Emanuel [00:41:58] So the North American warblers (the ones in Europe are not as colorful) have fascinated people for years and years. And they have these migrations and they have these breeding areas that they breed in.

Victor Emanuel [00:42:09] And they’re one of those things, and other people have this involving other things like, say, sporting events, you can’t get enough of. And in May, when they’re coming through Austin and as the month gets older, I’m thinking, “Warbler time is coming to an end this year for Austin until the fall when they come back.” Not all of them are colorful.

Victor Emanuel [00:42:33] And I’m kind of mourning the fact that warbler time is ending. And as I say, it’s it’s, I’m not the only one. Just warblers are my favorite birds. They’re these small little bits of color that bring joy and beauty into our life.

Lee Smith [00:42:54] So tell me about your involvement with the The Nature Conservancy. How did that begin and?

Victor Emanuel [00:43:00] Well, I’d heard about it from my mentors. I made donations, but I don’t. And I was a member. But really, what got me more involved was David Braun, he was the director of Nature Conservancy of Texas. And he suggested to people on the board that they put me on the board. It was because of David, I became a member of the board.

Victor Emanuel [00:43:20] And I met all these wonderful people. One of them had been my teacher at University of Texas, a specialist on fish. I’m forgetting his name right now.

Jeff Weigel [00:43:29] Clark Hubbs?

Victor Emanuel [00:43:31] Yes. Yes. And so I met some wonderful people. Members from Dallas like that, like Rusty Rose, who became a dear friend of mine who died a few years ago. And saw people that were really involved and and I went to meetings.

Victor Emanuel [00:43:51] And what I’m most proud of is that, and I was traveling a lot. I’d come back and be home for three days and travel again. I don’t know how I did all that, or why I did all that – the amount of traveling.

Victor Emanuel [00:44:06] But I came back from a trip. And the executive director called me and said, “Victor, are you coming to a meeting in Houston tomorrow?” A Monday. Or maybe he called me on Friday. “You coming on Monday?” I said, “No, I just got back.” “Can you make this meeting?” And it’s in Houston at like 10:00 in the morning at a law firm, actually, Vinson Elkins.

Victor Emanuel [00:44:24] And he said, “Victor, we really need you there because we’re going to talk about the Davis Mountains, acquisition of land there to preserve the Davis Mountains. And we need you because I know you’re for it. We need support.”

Victor Emanuel [00:44:38] So I got up early and drove down to Houston to this meeting, and they told me – this is the executive director. We’re not going to have a vote on whether we should do this. We’re just going to kind of fill people in on what’s going on.

Victor Emanuel [00:44:52] So they started talking about it and what the land, how much land it was and how much is going to cost them in the Davis Mountains.

Victor Emanuel [00:44:59] And I was a high school debater, so I’m used to kind of making arguments. So one guy was on the board who owned a lot of apartments in Houston. He said, “We shouldn’t do this. We owe so much money, already.” You want debt to buy this land that’s become available? It’s not a good idea.”

Victor Emanuel [00:45:20] So I raised my hand and I said, “The Davis Mountains are where the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre of Mexico overlap. You have birds and animals from the north, and birds have animals that breed further south. They’re both around the Davis Mountains.

Victor Emanuel [00:45:38] It’s a unique area in the entire United States. To have two mountains come together. Almost a little bit of that in Arizona, too, particularly in the Davis Mountains.”

Victor Emanuel [00:45:49] And again, being a debater and being involved, I said, if the Nature Conservancy had to sell all the other property it owns to get the money to buy the Davis Mountains, they should do it. And I want to make a motion that we support our staff and go ahead with this project.”

Victor Emanuel [00:46:12] And it passed unanimously.

Victor Emanuel [00:46:14] And the the guy who was the executive director and my friend James King both credited me with playing an important role. It wasn’t. There were other people that were helping a lot, and as you know, probably know, that David had a bullet go near him in Fort Davis, maybe from some local person that was against the project, David Braun. But anyway, he didn’t get hit.

[00:46:38] But it was but they got the guy to own the land to be willing to sell it, and the Nature Conservancy jumped in and bought it. And some of their donors bought some pieces of it that they couldn’t buy. And it’s one of the greatest things they’ve ever done.

Lee Smith [00:46:52] And why is that role of the Nature Conservancy important to identify these special places and protect them?

Victor Emanuel [00:47:05] Because they’re, because if you don’t, they’re gone. They’re disappearing.

Victor Emanuel [00:47:09] And that’s what E.O. Wilson talked about, other people, all of the world, areas have been, it’s going on for thousands of years. That’s what man does as he expands.

Victor Emanuel [00:47:18] And we could have a solar panels field there. We could have a a factory here.

Victor Emanuel [00:47:24] And, you know, it’s it’s incredibly important. And the wonderful pieces of land we have around the world was because someone cared.

Victor Emanuel [00:47:36] Perhaps the most dramatic is the Serengeti. And I was just there. I’ve been there recently, the last few years, because no one went to Africa except for hunting until the head of the zoo in Berlin had this brilliant idea. I love people like this. We will do a trip for people to go see the animals. The Berlin Zoo will organize it.

Victor Emanuel [00:47:58] So he starts taking trips there. And they had just recently become independent because England let them be independent. And he met the first prime minister and influenced him that we need to set aside land where these animals are. And it all happened, all happened because this guy coming from Germany and now we have the Serengeti.

Victor Emanuel [00:48:20] And his son went down and worked on surveying and everything. And unfortunately, he had a plane problem, and his plane crashed. He died. And there’s a monument to him right there.

Victor Emanuel [00:48:29] So what we have, we’ve lost an enormous amount. And as a naturalist and I saw this with my mentors. My other great mentor was Edgar Kincaid, I should, I should have mentioned him. He was J. Frank Dobie’s nephew. And he wrote the book, he edited Oberholser’s book called “The Birds of Texas”. He was a great naturalist and birder in conservation. He was my third mentor. The other two were in Houston. When I moved to Austin, I became very close friends with Edgar.

Victor Emanuel [00:48:56] But you know, they saw the land being changed. Edgar told me about a train trip he made to southern Mexico and the forest was on fire and pieces of the trees were just hitting the train as he was going south. Everything was burning up.

Victor Emanuel [00:49:13] So, man, as I say, as they say in Antigone in a soliloquy about this, man has been affecting the world and nature for thousands of years, ever since man sort of, you know, becoming little tribes and things and wanting more land.

Victor Emanuel [00:49:29] And the Nature Conservancy is one of the most important organizations that has recognized that. And also I like the fact that it focuses on getting a big chunk of land like in Belize, that rainforest around in Western Belize that was going to be cut down. And that’s where there are jaguars and oscellated turkeys. It’s the only other turkey in the world and they’re not many left in the world because wherever else they were the forest was cut down or they were killed and eaten.

Victor Emanuel [00:50:03] And Nature Conservancy stepped in. It’s one of the best thing that’s happened in my life in the last few years is that Chan Chich, that area right around the lodge called Chan Chich, got saved. Because it could all be gone.

Victor Emanuel [00:50:16] One of our leaders were leading a field trip there and just from the lodge, this Chan Chich lodge, to the airstrip, he had 20 kinds of hawks, including all three hawk eagles, which are these spectacular big hawks. Well, Nature Conservancy saved it. If it hadn’t been the Nature Conservancy, done, gone.

Victor Emanuel [00:50:35] So it it identifies crucial areas and large areas and mobilizes the effort. And it takes a huge effort because land is very expensive and they’ve done a lot. There’s a lot more to be done.

Victor Emanuel [00:50:50] As I say, these warblers, I love warblers, they go down to spend the winter in Belize and now it’s just a cornfield. Their habitat is gone. Their winter habitat is gone and we see their numbers dropping.

Lee Smith [00:51:05] Well, as you said, it takes a lot of effort. And it’s it’s not just the Nature Conservancy. The way that they cultivate and seek out partners – how important is that part of the equation?

Victor Emanuel [00:51:23] It’s very important, and the partners are extremely important. What I would like to see and I know Nature Conservancy has tried, and other groups, is more broad reach. But in the United States, there are 50 million bird watchers. If each of them gave $10 a year. It’s really what’s transformed political campaigns is lots of small donations. It used to be just large donors.

Victor Emanuel [00:51:48] The same thing with conservation. What I would like to see is it transform more, you know, more small donors. As I say, a 50 million birdwatcher each give $10 a year, I mean $10 or $100. It adds up to a lot of money.

Victor Emanuel [00:52:02] But my biggest thing that I’d like to see happen, and I’d like Nature Conservancy, it may not be their role, but in my life right now is providing nature centers that really do get children connected to nature.

Victor Emanuel [00:52:18] And my big project for, as they say, the time I have left, is a world class nature center on the eastern half of Travis County, where there’s nothing like that. The Wildflower Garden got moved to the west. There’s no major facility and the land is there. So it’s not a matter of buying land. It owned by the city and the county. And I want a nature center for children that are six and up.

Victor Emanuel [00:52:44] And one of the things I’ve asked people on tours is whether their kids are interested in nature. And many of them they’re not. Some of them they are – generally interested in nature, not specifically in the birds.

Victor Emanuel [00:52:53] And I think the key thing is to get children when they’re very young, before they get involved in soccer and other sports and war games and watching things on their computer and dating and things that are important in their life and that that become a focus of their life.

Victor Emanuel [00:53:12] But I have some young friends that have a little boy. He’s now about to turn nine. And they and I started him when he was like six. And the key thing is when you take a little kid out like that and they are small and they’re walking and they say, “Look at that spider over there.” You then say, “Oh!” this guy’s, this boy’s name is Geo. “Geo, that’s a beautiful spider. Thank you for spotting it. Let’s go watch it.”

Victor Emanuel [00:53:39] So celebrate what they have done. Call attention to their spotting abilities and that their ego takes hold of that. And they see that as a important thing to do, as something. And so now when their dad goes in and wakes them up and “Dad, there’s a golden woodpecker right outside my window!”

Victor Emanuel [00:54:03] And now this little boy, Geo, whose parents are nature people and they work in nature, one of them works for me. Geo, their older son, they didn’t get a chance to do as much, but Geo is totally turned on.

Victor Emanuel [00:54:16] And they were going to a family reunion in Minnesota and he told his father, “What I really want to see is a pileated woodpecker.” Nine years old, even knows what a pileated woodpecker is? And when he went to the Texas coast, the warbler he most wanted to see – a hooded warbler, because he knows that’s my bird name. And I’ve given him a T-shirt for the hooded warbler.

Victor Emanuel [00:54:39] But you have to get them when they’re young. And it will change their life.

Victor Emanuel [00:54:43] And the book “Last Child in the Woods” points out – less smokers, less drug addicts, less people suffering from depression. And conservationists, if you start them when they’re young. It will change their life.

Victor Emanuel [00:54:57] And then if there’s a time in their life when they’re really depressed about something, “Oh, I had a bad day at school, or this happened, or had a fight with this boy or girl. I broke up with my girlfriend or whatever.” What John Muir pointed out, and Thoreau and Burroughs, a walk in nature, all of that fades away for a while. You’re in your own world, the world of nature.

Victor Emanuel [00:55:22] And there’s a wonderful and I’d like for and in my nature center that I hope for, not mine, the nature center I want built, there will be a library with nature books. There’ll be a swimming pool. There’ll be a wading pool. There will be a butterfly garden, a wildflower garden. It’ll be what I call world class, meaning more than most nature centers.

Victor Emanuel [00:55:42] And the other element is that if you want your child to sign up (and it’ll probably be free because a lot of the people couldn’t afford it), we will pick them up at your house and take them to the nature center because you’ve got to get to work. And that could take an hour in Austin to get their work from where you live. We’ll take you from your house to the nature center. Bring them home.

Victor Emanuel [00:56:05] And so that’s my big project right now is a world-class nature center. Change people’s lives, create more conservationists, and and help them in the rough times in their life, which everybody has.

Victor Emanuel [00:56:19] And there’s a wonderful book. And people don’t read old books. I love the classics, but I also love like there’s a wonderful book called “Speaking for Nature”, 1950. Most people never heard of it. There are two books I wish that more people read – “Speaking for Nature”, and I’ll tell you about the Teale books.

Victor Emanuel [00:56:37] But “Speaking for Nature”, it’s about the fact that around 1895, very few people were interested in nature or conservation and everything was being cut down. And some people think everything is there for man and to cut it down and we don’t have to worry about it. And Muir started writing. Thoreau had written earlier. Thoreau and then Muir and Burroughs. And there were national publications, magazines. In those days, people read magazines, not cell phones, that read, that had these articles.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:09] And it changed people’s attitude toward nature, and it led to the creation of the Wilderness Act. It only passed the Senate by one vote. The Wilderness Act took a lot of lobbying.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:19] And one of the guys, who led it – one of the wilderness areas is named after him. I think it’s Murphy.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:24] And but anyway, these writers, they’re writing of people like Muir.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:29] So with these kids that I want to get the nature center. I want to read some of that book to them and then to learn about these people that made a difference in our country.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:41] And one of the most famous, of course, is the woman who wrote “Silent Spring”. And and of course, Muir and Burroughs and all these other writers.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:50] And so in this nature center there would be a library and people would be exposed to these.

Victor Emanuel [00:57:55] But the other one I’d like people to read, which is just remarkable, by Edwin Way Teale and his wife. As he got older and they had, I think, semi-retired, they could afford to do this.

Victor Emanuel [00:58:09] “North with the Spring”, they traveled from the tip of Florida to New Hampshire and wrote about what they saw. But they didn’t do it in like two weeks. They did it from the beginning of spring to the end of spring, and they saw everything, so much.

Victor Emanuel [00:58:24] Then after that “Journey into Summer”, from New Hampshire to Montana to Colorado to Texas, what they saw. Journey into Summer – wandering. And then the next one, “Autumn Across America” and then “Wandering through Winter”, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the first nature book ever to win the Pulitzer. Most people never heard of it. And he was a top writer for Audubon magazine.

Victor Emanuel [00:58:52] There was a wonderful discussion, article about him after he died in the magazine. He lived in Connecticut. His main interest was insects, just like E.O. Wilson and he was a wonderful writer. And he and his wife made all these trips. And it’s a very beautifully written book.

Victor Emanuel [00:59:12] And the dedication is very touching because the dedication of the book on the first page is to “David, who traveled with us in our hearts”, because their son was killed right at the end of World War II in one of the last missions. “David, who traveled with us in our hearts”.

Victor Emanuel [00:59:35] But what they saw was just amazing. And they did all this research. So they knew there was a woman in Kansas where they had lived who had more meteorites in her farm than anyone had ever had. And they went to visit her and they got to stay on her land. And she moved there and bought a farm.

Victor Emanuel [00:59:56] And she wondered what all these little red and black things on the ground, little black like pebbles. So she asked some of her neighbors what they were. “Oh, it’s just black pebbles.” She took it to a scientist. “These are meteorites, everything on your land are meteorites.” And she collected them. She got enough money from selling the meteorites to pay for the farm.

Victor Emanuel [01:00:15] So Edwin Way Teale and his wife went there during the Perseids and meteors were just falling all over. And they, it’s a beautiful part of the of the book where he says, “It was one of the best nights of their life to see all these meteorites coming down on their farm.”

Victor Emanuel [01:00:30] But they did that. It’s filled with things like that. They went to a little peninsula in Lake Michigan, which had the most orchids of any place in the United States, and the community had bought the peninsula to save it.

Lee Smith [01:00:45] Wild orchids?

Victor Emanuel [01:00:46] Wild orchids, native orchids. There are a lot of them in Canada, too.

Victor Emanuel [01:00:51] But there was a night … They were in Indiana and there used to be more wetlands there, but there were so many fireflies, they couldn’t go to sleep all night. They just drove around looking at it. There were thousands of fireflies all night. They saw that, wrote about it.

[01:01:05] Now, Edwin Way Teale – those books, I’d like for kids to read, or at least parts of them be read to them. But that’s my dream. And it will create more conservationists and more members of Nature Conservancy.

Lee Smith [01:01:26] So I’ve kind of gotten off.

Victor Emanuel [01:01:28] Yeah, I think I’ve been rambling on and on, probably.

Lee Smith [01:01:32] But but, but, we’re covering several things that I’ve, you know, asked about – Davis Mountains.

Lee Smith [01:01:42] Now were you on, so you were on the on the board then when that happened.

Speaker 2 [01:01:48] With the Davis Mountains. Yes. Very proud of it.

Lee Smith [01:01:50] What were some of the other challenges to getting that one done?

Victor Emanuel [01:01:54] Well, once I you know, the board all went along with what I said and then they all, you know, went ahead and did it.

Victor Emanuel [01:02:03] I have been on the road so much of my life, you know, 45 years. One of our leaders – Steve Hilty in Kansas. Some of my friends stopped to see him on the way. He said he had done 500 trips. I’ve done so many trips that I was mainly on the road. I didn’t get to go to meetings.

Victor Emanuel [01:02:23] Same thing happened when I was I was on the board for years of the Cornell Lab board. And one time John Fitzpatrick, who was the executive director for a years, he said, “Victor, wouldn’t you just come to one board meeting, because people are asking me, why aren’t you coming?” And I love the Cornell Lab. It’s another wonderful organization and they work together. But I didn’t go to many board meetings of the Nature Conservancy in Texas when I was on the board. But I did to some.

Victor Emanuel [01:02:50] One thing I wanted to ask, you know, the Davis Mountains and its proximity to the McDonald Observatory and the dark skies and how important that is for astronomers.

Victor Emanuel [01:03:11] And for people.

Lee Smith [01:03:12] And people too, to experience. But what about birds? How are dark skies important to birds?

Victor Emanuel [01:03:24] I’m not the best person to answer that although birds use stars for migration. Obviously the answer is migration.

Lee Smith [01:03:33] Yeah, there’s been some recent stuff recently on our listserv, everybody saying, you know, during the migration, you know, please turn off whatever lights you have.

Victor Emanuel [01:03:42] Well it is only tells them how to go, but if you have a building that’s lighted, they tend to orient to that and they hit the building. And so light, lighted cities can disrupt bird migration. That’s the short answer.

Lee Smith [01:03:58] Is that…

Victor Emanuel [01:04:03] And Cornell is doing a lot of work with that. And one of the guys … .

Victor Emanuel [01:04:06] The thing I’m most proud of doing was starting a summer camp for kids that we’ve done for 35 years, and some of them are now working in conservation. A lot of them are.

Victor Emanuel [01:04:16] But the dark skies are very important. But more important, in my view, is land acquisition. And that’s what Nature Conservancy does, because they have a place to live and breed. It’s like people having housing. Birds need housing, too.

Lee Smith [01:04:37] How have you seen the Nature Conservancy evolve over the years that you’ve been involved?

Victor Emanuel [01:04:42] Well, again, I have to confess that with all the other things I do and all the trips, I haven’t watched it as closely as I wish I had. But I think one of the main way it’s evolved is large tracts of land like they did in Belize – the importance of large acquisitions.

Victor Emanuel [01:04:58] Because when it started out, like with my friend Joe Heiser buying that little, the pitcher plants there, area. I’m glad he did it. It’s now part of the of the of the park in east Texas you know the Big Thicket park, that land that Joe helped raise some money to build for these donors. I told you about these Texaco people, and that’s wonderful to have that. But large tracts of land.

Lee Smith [01:05:26] Is there anything that you want? I mean, you talked about your nature center. Is there any other any other thing you wanted to?

Victor Emanuel [01:05:35] Well, that’s my project is that nature center. But I would like to see conservation groups and I know TNC might not be it, but having nature centers all over the country because I think it’s the key thing. Get kids involved, for their sake and for conservation’s sake.

Victor Emanuel [01:05:50] And the guy who is head of National Audubon did it in a few places, and then they had a parting of the ways with him. And I just don’t think enough is being done for kids.

Victor Emanuel [01:06:02] And it’s for the kids, but for nature, because of what affects their life, the depression right now around here and drugs and everything – not the nature people. Almost no one who has ever come on one of our tours has smoked. And, you know, I go to countries like Israel and almost everybody is smoking. That one thing I’m proud of our country is we really have cut back on smoking. But the people that are nature people, it changes their life. And we see that with the people that are coming on our tours and how they tell us it changed their life and does change their life.

Lee Smith [01:06:41] So what advice would you give to someone, a young person that’s interested in conservation? What would you tell them?

Victor Emanuel [01:06:48] Join your local club, your nature club, if there is one, in your city, and go on field trips with them and meet people. And get out in nature as much as you can and read about it, study it, learn about it, learn.

Victor Emanuel [01:07:07] You know, one thing I see about people in nature is, it isn’t, “I did a walk and I was out in nature.” We need to learn like the ancient people did, the original settlers of the United States, the original tribes. That’s a live oak. It’s the state tree of Texas. It’s called a live oak because it loses its leaves in the spring and gets new ones. Oh, and that tree over there, that’s a cypress tree. It likes to grow near water and some of them put up parts of the body called knees.

Victor Emanuel [01:07:39] But learn the names of the plants and the birds and then you are connected to nature. That is the key thing: get connected to nature and doing a walk is not enough. All the people like Muir and Thoreau, they talked about that – being connected to nature. You have to learn the names and about as much as you can about the things you’re seeing.

Lee Smith [01:08:01] So what is your outlook on the future of conservation?

Victor Emanuel [01:08:07] I go up and down. I see a lot of good things being done. I see a lot of destruction. The biggest problem, and E.O. Wilson knew it very well, is just the numbers of people, the increase in the number of people and the the power of money. You know, money has been very important for saving land. But it also like look at the Great Salt Lake, where we’re going to have it dry up because people want to grow crops and get and there’s so much more that could be done.

Victor Emanuel [01:08:39] So I see it. You know, you read the good story and I read the bad stories. The Great Salt Lake is the worst. I mean, and to me, I’m shocked that people have these lawns in Salt Lake City. They don’t in Phoenix, have grass that they water. Well, that water would have gone to the Great Salt Lake.

Victor Emanuel [01:09:03] So I see pluses. You know, I see good stories and not good stories. So I can’t really predict, you know. I’m happy we have the good stories. But one friend of mine said, “We’re winning the battles, but we’re losing the war.”

Victor Emanuel [01:09:24] And the war is huge. And it’s complicated because it involves a lot of things about humanity and the world. In Spain, I was … Our local leader is a wonderful conservationist. He said, a lot of the habitat where we have seen birds and we were seeing birds is being cut down to grow strawberries and blueberries. Habitat is gone, but it’s giving people jobs.

Victor Emanuel [01:09:56] So we buy that land. And then what do these people do? So it’s kind of inter-related with the larger issue of man and man, and this has been going on for thousands of years. How when there are too many and how people can have lives that fit into nature and live together? So it’s very complex and very hard to predict.