A great time was had by everybody who attended. Family members and friends of Judy gathered at the home of Patrice Toups - Schultz to celebrate the memory of this wonderful woman who touched so many people with her warm wit, easygoing style, and expert knowledge of the avian world. Whether you were a birder or one of her brood, she brought out the best in you.
Christina remembers Judy
Anyone who was at this ceremony is welcome to leave a comment to identify everyone.Pictures by Sharon Milligan.
by Jean Prescott
©2007 The Sun Herald/McClatchy Newspapers
Judy Toups, the Coast's renowned "bird lady," is going to miss spring migration this year for what probably is the first time since her ornithological interests began in 1972. It is not by choice. Toups died quietly at home Tuesday in Decatur, Ala., of complications from medical problems. She was 77.
Overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina's destruction - of bird habitat and the property of myriad friends and acquaintances here - she moved to that small Alabama town barely a year after the storm.
Born at the front-end of the Great Depression, in 1930, Toups met and married a handsome sailor from Mississippi - Jay Toups - in Gloucester, Mass., just minutes from her hometown of Magnolia, and returned with him to his home state in 1965, the year he mustered out of the Navy. They would settle in Gulfport and raise six children there: Jeffrey, young Jay, Patrice, Christine and twins Drayton and Desmond.
Toups' parents realized, on one of their visits to the Coast, that a stay-home mom of six young children desperately needed a diversion. Someone bought a feeder. Someone else identified a bird, and Toups was off and running.
Everyone who knew her has an extraordinary personal story to tell.
Coast artist and veteran birder Alison Henry recalled her first field trip with Toups: "Here I was meeting the rock star of birding." As the group gathered in the pre-dawn blackness, "Judy said, 'Oh, good, everybody's here. Now all we have to do is wait for the birds to wake up.' I thought it quite remarkable. She was a brilliant teacher, a best friend and an honest critic. I was addicted to her as a person."
Don McKee, another Toups friend and fan said Tuesday, "My opinion is that all of nature has lost a very dear friend, especially our avian friends. She will be remembered always as the mother of birdwatching in Mississippi. I don't think of her as gone," McKee said. "Today she's soaring with the eagles."
This writer's personal story goes something like this: In the late 1980s, she performed a daring rescue of a sharp-shinned hawk from the front screened porch of a house where we lived in Bay St. Louis. The bird had barreled through the screen in pursuit of a squirrel and had been trapped on the porch, disoriented and unable to find the door and freedom. With only a quilt between her and sharp beak and talons, Toups dropped the bed covering over this formidable raptor, and with yours truly carrying the trailing tails of the quilt, she carried the swaddled bird outside and let it go.
What a woman.
At that point she had been writing a weekly column for the Sun Herald for 15 years; nearly 20 more years would follow.
Toups founded the Mississippi Coast Audubon Society and advanced its conservation causes, including the high-profile protection program for least terns and black skimmers, "Nest in Peace."
She taught Seashore Methodist Assembly elderhostels and sent fledgling birders out across Coast terrain in search of native and visiting birds. Birders from every part of the United States knew her.
She developed the Mississippi Coastal Birding Trail map, and wrote two books on birding the Gulf Coast, plus innumerable articles for every birding journal ever published in late 20th-century America.
There is a trail named after Judy Toups in Jackson County's Ward Bayou, and she has been honored by birding societies too numerous to count.
Judy at ceremony naming a nature trail in Vancleave after her in September, 2004.
Soar High, Old Friend - Unattributed author
For 32 years, Judith Toups' columns on birds and birding educated and entertained this newspaper's readers. Her books and birding exploits and dry wit endeared her to a legion of birders across the country. Her legacy includes an active Mississippi Coast Audubon Society and thousands of readers who have a greater interest in the fascinating feathered world in our backyards and bayous.
That fascinating world lost a dear friend and champion on Tuesday with Judy Toups' death in Decatur, Ala.
Our community is lessened by the loss of our Birding Laureate. Among the many personal farewells, we like the suggestion of Mark LaSalle, one of her many friends and director of the Pascagoula River Audubon Center: "... after your moment of thought, please do what Judy wanted all of us to do - look outside and enjoy nature. That's where I will look for her now."
###Birder's World Field of View
"The first time I spoke with Toups was shortly after Hurricane Katrina had struck Mississippi and Louisiana. She had ridden out the storm in her house but didn’t want to focus on her own story. She was more concerned with the birds in her yard, or lack thereof. Chickadees, titmice, and woodpeckers were scarce, and she was worried about them."
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Gulfport, Miss. — Tens of thousands of yellow-rumped warblers, migrating birds that wintered along the Gulf Coast for decades, haven't returned since Hurricane Katrina demolished their habitat 18 months ago.
Likewise, few if any least terns, a threatened species of tiny sea birds, have nested in the man-made beach preserve that conservationists set aside for them in 1975 along the Mississippi Coast.
A sign along the beach in Gulfport, Miss., warns people to stay away from an area that has been designated a nesting area for the least tern, a threatened species of tiny sea birds.
But clapper rails, noisy brown birds that had virtually disappeared from their home marshes last winter, were found to be back in pre-Katrina numbers in the latest Christmas bird count.
The issue of how feathered creatures have fared since Katrina changed the landscape of this region is "a big question, but nobody really knows," said Mark LaSalle, director of the Pascagoula River Audubon Center.
Large-scale tallies have shown that some birds never left, others disappeared for a while but seem to be returning, and still others could be gone forever.
The change vividly illustrates the interdependence of native plants and animals in this fragile coastal ecosystem and how one cataclysmic event can re-link the chain of life.
The conclusion "that the effect was greater than any other natural disaster in our history is unlikely to be refuted by students of Mississippi's bird life," Judith Toups wrote in Birders World magazine. Toups, who died late last month, co-authored the book, "Guide to Birding Coastal Mississippi and Adjacent Counties."
Along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama, the ecological balance has shifted, at least temporarily, explained Clint Jeske, wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wetlands Research Center in Louisiana.
The tidal surges of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita poured salt water into Louisiana's freshwater lowlands, for example. The storms were followed by a severe drought. "It was a double whammy," said Jeske. "The waters never got freshened up."
One result was the loss of millions of freshwater crawfish, and a resulting dearth of wading birds that feed on them, including roseate spoonbills, great blue herons and snowy egrets.
On the uninhabited Chandeleur Islands in the Gulf below New Orleans, Katrina knocked down almost all the hackberry trees. So the islands' usually abundant songbirds, including cardinals and mockingbirds, are "very, very scarce" this winter because their diet was mostly hackberries, said Jeske.
It is too early to tell if the birds have permanently flown the coop.
"Obvious trends show that some birds are missing," said LaSalle, who heads the Mississippi Gulf Coast Nest in Peace project. "But I can't tell you if the birds died or just left. They may have just flown out of the way of Katrina."
While the endangered least terns have not returned to their beach sanctuary near Gulfport, they nested in greater than usual numbers on the barrier islands off the Mississippi coast, where the hurricanes deposited sand and built up depleted beaches.
Other species seem to have benefited from the storm's effects.
Katrina seems to have spurred the growth of clams in Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans, said Jeske. So flocks of lesser scaups, small blue-billed ducks that like to dine on young clams, are unusually large.
In the annual Christmas bird count, circles with a diameter of seven and a half miles are established and surveyed by experienced birders, explained LaSalle, the Audubon official. Two circles in south Mississippi have been monitored every season for 25 years.
The count catches resident birds like cardinals and blue herons that live in the region all year long. And it includes birds like the American goldfinch that spend the cold months here. However, it misses some seasonal breeders, including least terns, which migrate to South America during the winter but return in early spring to nest.
A separate least tern project, which has gone on for 30 years, documents their presence or absence, said LaSalle.
Even in the bleakest days after Katrina, though, there were stories that kept the hearts of birders atwitter.
"The brightest spot amid the ruins of Katrina was occupied by the ruby-throated hummingbird," Toups wrote in Bird Watchers Digest. "Like the small miracle that it is, it came in unprecedented numbers on the morning following that darkest of days.
"Unfortunately, it sought nourishment in a place in which no blossom survived and insect life had been decimated. The few retail outlets that returned to business within a week were soon sold out of nectar feeders, which in turn precipitated a call for help that would become known as Operation Backyard Recovery — a continuing effort that first resulted in the dispersal of hundreds of donated feeders."
Operation Backyard Recovery is now encouraging returned residents of the Gulf Coast to build birdhouses and plant trees.
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