The Island community turned out Monday for a memorial gathering in memory of Island naturalist Gus Ben David, the original director of Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, who died July 4 at 81.
Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury was packed for the occasion, with close to 300 family members, friends and admirers in the seats and dozens more standing along the back wall.
“The crowd here is epic, as Gus is,” said longtime friend Anne Carmichael Whiting, one of nine speakers who recalled Mr. Ben David’s joyful spirit of discovery and boundless enthusiasm for sharing his love of nature with one and all.
“The gift of Gus the teacher-naturalist lives on,” Ms. Whiting told the crowd.
“‘Marvelous’ was one of his favorite words,” she said, urging listeners to keep close to the natural world the way Mr. Ben David did.
“Pay attention to the little things... to the damsel fly, the eagle, the hawk, the birds. Go to Ocean Park and watch the brant flying in and out, which he loved to do, and marvel, and be kind,” she said, to applause.
Louis DePalma, one of Mr. Ben David’s 13 grandchildren (he also left two great-grandchildren), recalled the comfort of sitting on his grandfather’s lap and the patience with which Mr. Ben David indulged the youngster’s own interests.
“It melts my heart [that] as much as I listened to him, and loved to hear him talk, he loved listening to me,” said Mr. DePalma, who fought back tears more than once as he spoke.
“I just want to thank him a lot in my heart, and I’m glad that we’re here to share more with you,” Mr. DePalma said.
Granddaughter Liliana Borges smiled through her tears as she spoke of Mr. Ben David as both a grandfather and a teacher
“He shared his love of the world with anyone who listened. He could talk for hours about birds and turtles and just the nature of the world,” she said, her voice breaking as she continued. “He was truly amazing and the best grandfather I could ever ask for.”
Ornithologist Rob Bierregaard, now a leading authority on ospreys, first met Mr. Ben David as a fellow falconer in 1969.
“I spent the next five summers studying raptors — harriers, kestrels, and ospreys — on the Vineyard, with Gus as my mentor,” said Mr. Bierregaard, who saluted Mr. Ben David’s work to rebuild the Island’s osprey population by providing nesting poles.
“I remember climbing into my first osprey nest at Mink Meadows in 1971. There were two pairs on the Island at that time. This year, there were over 130,” Mr. Bierregaard said, drawing widespread applause.
Island naturalist Tom Chase told the crowd he was a reptile-obsessed kid when he first encountered Mr. Ben David.
“It wasn’t until I met Gus when I was a teenager that I discovered that this childhood fascination could actually be legitimate as a field of study. It was called herpetology, [and] you could do this for a living,” Mr. Chase said.
“And that just lit my brain on fire,” he said.
Cindy Kallet, who volunteered at Felix Neck as a teenager in the 1970s and later went on to a career as a folk singer-songwriter and recording artist, slung on her guitar before speaking to the crowd.
In 1977, as she was finishing college, Mr. Ben David hired her to manage his new Vineyard Serpentarium on the Oak Bluffs Harbor, Ms. Kallet said.
“I lived above the snake pit, and that’s where I wrote [this],” she said, before encouraging everyone to sing along on the chorus to Roll to the River, her song about the Island’s natural world and changes over time.
Conservationist Brad Winn and physician Peter Rabinowitz also shared recollections of Mr. Ben David’s mentorship and example.
Mr. Winn, now a shorebird specialist with Manomet Conservation Sciences in Plymouth, was a young boy with a box of displaced baby rabbits when he first met Mr. Ben David at the Felix Neck barn.
“I was clueless to the significance of this rabbit delivery, and how a walk through the path once would be followed by a thousand more trips to the barn [and] the very first steps in what would become a career,” he said.
“He taught me how to interpret nature’s complexity and, importantly, how to recognize the beauty in nature,” Mr. Winn said.
Dr. Rabinowitz called Mr. Ben David one of his first teachers in the realm of healing. Now a professor and physician at the University of Washington School of Medicine and School of Public Health, he was a high school volunteer at Felix Neck after the massive oil spill of 1970 that left countless sea birds killed or contaminated on Island beaches.
Mr. Ben David’s care for the oiled birds, and other injured wildlife brought to Felix Neck, made a lifelong impression, Dr. Rabinowitz said.
“He explained the threats that awaited a rehabilitated animal in the wild — not just nutrition, but predators and automobiles, the challenge of finding food,” the doctor recalled.
Mr. Ben David’s approach led Dr. Rabinowitz to develop a similar philosophy for treating his human patients.
“When I care for a patient, I should not only treat disease, but also work to restore balance between the patient’s host resilience and the stress of the patient’s environment,” he told the crowd.
The formal celebration of Mr. Ben David’s life concluded with a performance of the John Denver song The Eagle and the Hawk by David Stephens, joined on the chorus by audience members.
Before adjourning for a buffet lunch and informal story-swapping in Mr. Ben David’s memory, Ms. Whiting had some final words.
“To honor him, it’s up to each one of us in here, and everyone that we know, to stop, pay attention, listen the screech owl out, watch the birds, watch the insects, watch the world in a minute way — as Gus was wont to do — and marvel in it,” she said.
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