Newsday WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2001 LIFESTYLES FOOD WEDNESDAY Bubble Tea B14 Part2 A Cafe That Celebrates the Mind, B3 TThehe NNaturalistaturalist

WhenWhen Dennis Dennis PulestonPuleston died died last last weekweek at at 95, 95, the the world world lostlost a a passionate passionate protectorprotector of of thethe woodlands, woodlands, thethe marshes, marshes, the the

HW riversrivers and and all all of of nature’snature’s creatures creatures B6-7

1997 Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland B6 A

Part 2 an Mof the Natural World BirdswereDennisPuleston’sparticularjoy.Butallthatnature offeredwasinhiscareduringthe95yearsofhisadventurouslife.

“And on the shore the wild doves mourn in the evening and then there comes a pang, some kind of emotional jar, and a longing. And if one followed his whispering impulse he would walk away slowly into the thorny bush following the call of the doves.” — John Steinbeck, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”

LL HIS LIFE, Dennis Puleston heard the doves — the doleful call that signals spring. No won- der his family picked this quote from Steinbeck for his memorial card. The doves called to him of rebirth and the earth’s awaken- ing. Of green places and wild things. And oh how they sang. I wish they would sing to me that way. I write about gardens and nature — about the living things that grow in the earth and rustle in the Awoods. But I have never heard what Dennis heard and when he died a little more than a week ago, I could only think what a loss it is for all of us who treasure this island we live upon. Who see the horse- shoe crabs mating on the spring tides and contem- plate ants and ospreys and search for wild orchids in the marshes and listen for the mourning doves. The doves of Dennis Puleston’s heart were not al- ways doves, of course. Sometimes they were yellow- billed cuckoos and scarlet tanagers and wood thrushes and rufous-sided towhees. And the ospreys that he At 25, Dennis Puleston embarked on a six-year helped bring back from the brink of extinction to the around-the-world voyage. Above, circa 1933, he’s at the Paumonok he loved as perhaps no walker of the wheel of the Marit, sailing from Newfoundland. woods and voyager of the bays and rivers has since Walt Whitman. Throughout the days and nights of his 95 years — some of them spent in howling ocean storms and Island in the New Hebrides. He was tattooed with a steaming jungles and frozen ice fields — the doves shark’s tooth by Samoans. He visited Antarctica 38 Three watercolor paintings by Puleston, who was the first that called to Dennis Puleston times — mostly in his later years as a cruise-ship nat- chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund: from top, took so many shapes. A golden- uralist, a job he took after he retired as director of an , white-winged crossbills, and common loons headed quetzal showing off its technical information at Brookhaven National Labo- shimmering iridescent plumage ratory. He voyaged to the North Pole on a nuclear- in the Venezuelan cloud forest. powered Soviet icebreaker, and when he reached the Puffins swarming in the air like Transpolar Bridge, he drank a glass of champagne gigantic bumblebees on a deso- and took a quick swim that he called “the polar ways and crowded towns and beaches,” he once late island off the coast of Nor- plunge.” wrote. “There are still cool woodlands, quiet rivers, way. Chinstrap penguins mat- As a naval architect with the wartime Office of Sci- salt marshes, overgrown meadows, and rolling sand ing in the shadow of a volcanic entific Research and Development, Dennis helped de- dunes to be enjoyed by those who have the eyes to crater spewing smoke and ash velop the DUKW amphibious landing craft that seek and the desire to learn about the other Long in the South Sandwich Islands. brought troops ashore in World War II. He trained Island.” 1 Irene A wandering albatross soaring the servicemen who operated the 2 /2-ton vehicles Dennis’ book “A Nature Journal” is a bible of this Virag in the wake of his ship as he and was wounded by shrapnel in Burma and re- other . But he did more than teach us cruised the Southern Ocean. ceived the Medal of Freedom. He was in the dunes at about our natural world — he was a pioneer and a From the day he stared at the Normandy catching his breath and listening to the conscience in the fight to preserve it. He was the black-speckled blue eggs of a sounds of battle around him when he heard a sky- first chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund, song thrush’s nest as a 3-year-old in his native En- lark singing. “I was deeply moved by this one ele- which started on Long Island in 1967 and sued the gland and fell in love with birds to the final months ment of sanity in the whole mad business of war,” he Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission to of his long life, Dennis was always plunging into would write years later. “That bird made me realize stop spraying DDT in local marshes. That led to a thorny bushes and looking at far horizons both real that someday all this would be over and I could enjoy statewide and then a nationwide ban of the deadly and remembered. birds again the way I had always wanted to.” pesticide. It all started with Dennis’ observations of When he was 25, he embarked on a six-year round- He came back to his adopted land of Long Island how DDT was affecting ospreys on Gardiners Island. the-world voyage in a 31-foot yawl. He sailed the to enjoy them. No matter where he adventured, Den- He had never seen an osprey until he came to Long South Seas with a 4-foot boa constrictor named Eg- nis always came back to Long Island. He came back Island and he didn’t want to lose them. bert coiled around his waist at the steering wheel. with his battered Bausch and Lomb binoculars and a He also persuaded his friends Maurice and Cecile

NEWSDAY, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20,He 2001 dined with cannibals on the island of Ndeni and poetic sensibility that never grew old. “Long Island Wertheim to give their hunting preserve on the Car- was kidnapped by armed natives on Espiritu Santa is so much more than shopping malls, concrete high- mans River in Shirley to the federal government as a B7 at2 2 Part

Newsday Photo / Thomas A. Ferrara Puleston’s wife, Betty, right, with their daughters, Sally McIntosh, left, and Jennifer Clement, at their home in Brookhaven hamlet.

We were talking on the phone and I could hear Steve Englebright crying.

HE ENVIRONMENTALISTS who knew Dennis Puleston admire his oneness with nature. John Turner, a naturalist and director of conser- vation programs for The Nature Conservancy, recalls the first time he met Dennis. “I was a young birder in my late teens. I saw him as I was walking into his most trea- sured place, Warbler Woods. ‘What did you see?’ I asked. He stopped and talked to me, just small talk, but I couldn’t believe I was talking to Dennis TPuleston. Years later, I was at a meeting — it was one of the first planning sessions of the Pine Barrens task force — and I looked over at Dennis. He was sketching an American kestrel. It was beautiful, perfectly proportioned, and he was drawing it from Puleston tours Wertheim Woods, circa 1955, with daughter Sally and son Peter. Puleston persuaded the Wertheim memory.” family to donate land near Carmans River in Shirley to the U.S. government as a wildlife refuge. , another founding member of the Envi- ronmental Defense Fund, was a fledgling teacher when he met Dennis 55 years ago. “We went on a wildlife refuge. And he convinced his own mother-in- and an Acadian flycatcher and the redder-than-a-car- birding trip and Dennis said, ‘Next time, bring along law to give part of the family acreage to further pro- dinal flash of a scarlet tanager in the treetops, but I some of your students.’ That started 20 years of field tect the river. Dennis and his wife, Betty, and their knew that nothing would have bothered Dennis and trips. Dennis was a natural teacher. Just three weeks ago, I heard him teaching his nurse how to four children lived in a white cottage on the banks of that he would have seen and heard volumes more. identify the yellow finches and grackles and house the Carmans. He painted the ospreys that nested on “I’d meet him on the trail during spring migration, sparrows in the backyard.” a platform in the marsh not far from the house and and he’d be so excited,” Marilyn told me. “He’d talk A nurse was helping Dennis when I visited him a took in a menagerie of creatures that ranged from a about an experience he had four or five years ago. It year ago. He said he’d been slowed down by heart turkey vulture to a pregnant turtle. was fall and he was canoeing on the Carmans River surgery. His hearing was failing, but he got on an ex- when a huge flock of tree swallows — thousands of He was a writer and a painter and a botanist and ercise bike every day and he still turned out the faith- an ornithologist. Birds were his particular joy. He birds — flew up from the wetlands and were swirling ful and lovely paintings of the birds that sustained heard them with an inner ear. I would give almost all around him. He was amazed. Whenever I saw his spirit. We talked about wild turkeys and tiger anything to be able to sense nature as he did. Espe- him he’d say, ‘Did I tell you about the tree swallows?’ salamanders and brown tide and over-fishing and cially in a place deep in the Pine Barrens that he I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And he’d smile and tell me again. He the dwarf beech forest endangered by a proposed golf named Warbler Woods, a forested oasis in Yaphank never lost his awe at the wonder of it all, he never course in Riverhead. “Why we need another golf where Neotropical songbirds come to breed. I walked got tired of it.” course I don’t know,” he said, his voice strengthen- 2001 20, JUNE WEDNESDAY, NEWSDAY, there recently with one of his friends, Marilyn En- “He could see birds with his ears,” said Steve ing, and I could imagine him with his fellow environ- gland, the president of the Open Space Council that Englebright, the state senator who is a geologist and mentalists in the small office in Stony Brook where Dennis helped found and the director of the The- a naturalist and fought alongside Dennis to save the the anti-DDT fight began with the motto “Sue the odore Roosevelt Sanctuary in Oyster Bay. I was Pine Barrens. “I remember him in Warbler Woods in bastards.” afraid of deer ticks, nervous about poison ivy and 1980 or ’81. It was the first time I was in the field He told me about meeting his wife. It was the sum- plagued by giant mosquitoes. I saw a red-eyed vireo with a gifted birder. He whistled and made birdcalls, mer of ’34 and Dennis was taking a break from his and he was talking to a half-dozen species of war- round-the-world voyage, working as a sailing instruc- blers and pointing out others too quick for me to see. tor at the American Yacht Club in Rye. Betty Well- I mean, I was a geologist — rocks don’t move that ington, soon to be a student at Bennington College, To read a previously unpublished fast. was competing in the women’s sailing champion- Letter to the Future from Dennis “When he was on the edge of the Carmans River, it ships for the Great South Bay racing team when she was like he was part of the ecosystem,” the senator Puleston, go on the Internet to tumbled overboard into Long Island Sound. Dennis said. “He was a sweet, sweet, unassuming man who jumped in to rescue her. “Are you all right?” he Newsday.com/features left a legacy of green on our island that will never go away.” See PULESTON on B13 AManoftheNaturalWorld B13

PULESTON from B6 called. The children would keep jour- nals and make reports on the ferns asked. “I’m fine,” she said. “How are and mushrooms and wildflowers they you?” saw in the woods. Q 2 Part Betty — whose family had resi- “Even when we were really little, he dences in New York City and the ham- always made us feel special,” said let of Brookhaven — kept up with Den- Sally. “He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky, nis through his letters to the yacht you have small hands so you’re the club commodore, who turned out to be only one who can reach up into the the father of her college roommate. nest and count the eggs.’ And he’d lift When Dennis returned to give a lec- ture three years later, they made a you up high so you could see.” When he date. But the malaria he’d contracted banded birds, Dennis let the children during his voyage flared up and he had hold them and feel the softness of their to cancel. “My dates weren’t coming up feathers and the flutter of life and re- with those kind of excuses every day,” lease them into the sky. Betty said last week when I stopped by It’s not surprising that spring was the cottage again. On Feb. 2, 1939, his favorite time of year. There was they married. After an adventurous the annual pilgrimage to hear the honeymoon sailing to Tahiti, they set spring peepers and see the mating up housekeeping on the banks of the dance of the woodcock. Jen and Sally Carmans. are in their 50s, but they reached back From the start, life at home was for childhood in front of me as they imi- filled with creatures great and small. tated and described the chirps and Dennis rescued a mourning dove that beeps of the courtship ritual. “And he had fallen out of its nest. Betty kept loved apple blossoms,” Jen said. “He’d ivy plants on either side of the fire- lie on his back under the apple tree place and that’s where the bird and soak in the blossoms like he’d roosted. “When we were first married never seen or smelled them before.” and living on $60 a month, we invited At night, while the children did the local doctor over for tea,” she re- their homework, Dennis sat at his membered. “The mourning dove flew out of the ivy, landed on the table and easel painting birds. Classical music walked all over the cakes. The doctor swelled in the cottage — the operas of politely refused the cakes, but we ate Puccini and Verdi, the magic of them later.” Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart. Dennis’ four children all became nat- “He always said the American redstart uralists. His oldest, Dennis Edward, a sounded with the first three notes of 38-year-old anthropology professor, ‘The Barber of Seville,’ ” said Art was killed in 1978 when he was struck Cooley. by lightning on a Mayan pyramid in Dennis was well into his 80s when the Yucatan. Jennifer Clement raises he went on his last nature cruise. By alpacas on the property next to her par- the time he was 90, he’d painted 230 ents and has followed her father as a species of birds that live on or visit naturalist on adventure cruises all Long Island. When he was 86, he over the world. Peter, also an onboard turned his diary into “A Nature Jour- naturalist, lives on a farm in New nal” for his children and their children AIR • HOTEL • VACATIONS • CRUISES Brunswick, Canada, where his sister, — there are seven grandchildren and Sally McIntosh, works at a nature three great-grandchildren with an- center. other on the way. One of his grand- daughters, Shelly Clevidence, who is S KIDS, they 32 and lives in Portland, Ore., is preg- didn’t have to go nant with her first child. She came Visit o u r w e b site or call u s tollfr ee: outdoors to find home four months ago to spend the the natural world. dwindling time with the man who Dennis had a pet taught her to drive and told her nature turkey vulture stories. that he named SALE! $ EACH “Once he had us out on a 14-mile ORLANDO 69 WAY Alger because the Based on Round Trip Purchase bird hissed. He hike on Gardiners Island and he kept would come to the us going with Tarzan stories,” Shelly said. “They all had an environmental DOMESTIC dinner table with Sample Discounted Fares from New York (Each Way Based Upon Round-Trip Purchase) Alger on his shoul- twist, of course — like Tarzan was sav- DESTINATIONS DESTINATIONS der. “This was a bird with a 6-foot ing the jungle from a conglomerate.” Los Angeles . . . .$137 Portland, OR. . . .$166 wingspan,” Sally told me as the sisters Last winter, Dennis wrote a note to El P a s o ...... $164 Denver ...... $101 A San Diego . . . . .$142 Tucson ...... $143 remembered life with father. “One the friends and family members who Orlando ...... $ 6 9 Palm Springs . . . $174 day, Alger grabbed the steak right off would celebrate his 95th birthday. “I R eno/Lake Tahoe $167 San Juan ...... $187 the serving platter in the middle of the have survived assaults on my carcass Seattle ...... $ 129 Santo Domingo .$269 table.” Art Cooley remembers a day by Brookhaven Hospital, shipwreck, San Francisco/Oakland .$137 San Jose ...... $149 more than 30 years ago when he found open heart surgery, Japanese shell Sacramento . . . . $142 Dennis snoozing at his easel, paint- fire, malaria and sundry other attacks. Miami ...... $65 Las Vegas . . . . . $139 brush in hand. Alger was perched on I am living on borrowed time.” His YD.5PQY0200 Dennis’ shoulder — sound asleep as birthday actually fell on Dec. 30, but INTERNATIONAL well. Sample Discounted Fares from New York (Each Way Based Upon Round-Trip Purchase) as he wrote in his trembling but clear DESTINATIONS DESTINATIONS There was the injured nighthawk script, “we are celebrating it on Satur- P aris ...... $294* Rome ...... $350 that roosted on a log in their fireplace day, November 11 because Jen and Milan ...... $369* Madrid ...... $344 London ...... $249 Athens ...... $391 and that they fed dried flies. And the Pete will be working in Antarctica Vienna ...... $413 Frankfurt ...... $344* 2001 20, JUNE WEDNESDAY, NEWSDAY, turtle that crawled into the house and later in the month and I didn’t want laid eggs under the piano. Betty was in Lisbon ...... $366 them to miss it. P.S. Please don’t *Ticket-by-Midnight, June 22, 2001 the hospital giving birth to one of her Airfare terms and conditions: Fares ar e subject to change without notice. F ares ar e not guaranteed until tick eted. Travel r estrictions grieve for me when I’m gone. It has apply on advance pur chase and excursion far es; some far es ar e nonr efundable and non-changeable and may r equir e a ser vice char ge, daughters. The day she came home, change fee and additional collection for any applicable far e differ ences. F ar es do not include $3-$18 airport passenger facility char ges, been a wonderful life, and further wher e applicable. F ar es do not include F ederal Segment F ees of $2.75 per domestic segment (defined as a tak eoff and a landing = one the turtle eggs hatched. “Guess who segment). International far es do not include departur e & ar rival taxes, P assenger F acility Char ges of $3-$18, wher e applicable, Custom cause for celebration.” User fees, Immigration fees and APHIS fees associated with international itineraries. All of these costs may add got more attention,” she said with a up to $95 to the far e on your international tick et. Fares are subject to eligibility r equir ements and seating limitations. Pur chase chuckle. Dennis touched the barnacle- and traveling r estrictions may apply . Far es may not be applicable to all destinations/times. Change fees up to $150 may apply . Every morning, Dennis would go on encrusted head of a gray whale in a for- 980 KELLY JOHNSON DRIVE, CLARK COUNTY, NY 89119 a mile-long walk along the marsh. eign sea but found enough beauty in He’d take his binoculars and his note- his own backyard to make Long Island book and his pet sheep. On the week- his homeport. He was a walker in Pau- EVERY WEDNESDAY COMPUTERS & TECHNOLOGY ends, there were field trips — usually monok and he wanted nothing so with Art Cooley and his students to much as to preserve it. We should all special places on Long Island where listen for the warblers and watch for the tiger salamanders bred and the the ospreys and remember Dennis warblers sang and the woodcocks Puleston. Ⅲ