Dr Joseph George

 

Dr Joseph George

1st October 1921 -  9th July 2012

Both photographs taken at his residence on 2nd June 2012

 

 

 

Dr Joseph George
1st October 1921 to 9th July 2012

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Dr Joseph George is no more. For all of us birdwatchers who came in contact with him, he inspired us with his knowledge and humility. And that humility was really striking. Although his English was excellent, he never used a capital ‘I’ in his writings. That was him, very characteristically him.

He encouraged us all to make our own observations, and made us understand that contributing to our knowledge of birds could be done by anyone, not just scientists. Though an organic chemist professionally, he wrote papers on birds, and encouraged us to publish too. Even the first ever publication of Dr Ramachandra Guha, the author, cricket fan and historian, written when Dr Guha was eleven, was because of Dr George! And it was, of course, on birds.

Dr George was meticulous in his observations and his work on bamboo nest boxes is a classic, merging his professional interests in wood science with his hobby interest in birds. The use of dyed feathers dispersed from a hillside so that swifts could pick it up for nest building, and the subsequent detection of those dyed feathers in the nests at the Forest Research Institute, was innovative. His counts of migrating Grey Drongos to determine timing of migration, and his mapping technique by using pre-dawn counts of stationary singing males to estimate territory densities were way ahead of his time. The latter possibly the earliest use of that technique anywhere in the world. And strangely, at a time when Indian ornithology did not even know the existence of an average, or of statistics.

He got his bachelor’s degree at St Joseph’s College, Trichinopoly, and went on to continue his studies at St John’s College, Agra, because he got a scholarship which he needed. His doctoral degree, if I recollect right, was by papers. It was chemistry through and through!

In his long innings at the Forest Research Institute at Dehra Dun, he and one Mr Gurdial Singh, a former Deputy Headmaster of the Doon School who was later awarded a Padma Shri, were the people who literally ‘ran’ the group birdwatching effort there. At that time, and especially so when the late Mr PD Stracey (of the Stracey Memorial School on St Marks Road fame) was the Director of the FRI, it was unofficially mandatory for every IFS trainee to go birdwatching with the group.

He then moved on to become the Assistant Director of the Buildings Research Institute, Roorkee, which had the late Lt. General Sir Harold Williams as its Director, and also Dr Dinesh Mohan, who later went on to become its Director after Sir Williams. Both these people were birdwatchers too. Dr George used to tell me that all three would travel as far down as Delhi from Dehra Dun, watching birds, in Sir Williams’ car. That of course, was only possible on non working days/hours when they met as birdwatchers outside the framework of official hierarchy!

It was during this tenure here that Dr George prepared a tick-able checklist of the birds of Delhi, actually two editions, both not authored, one in the fifties and the other in the sixties. Sir Williams funded the printing of both these checklists, and they were printed (but paid for!) at the Printing Press of the Bengal Engineers (like the MEG here). Sir Williams had been the Director-General of the Bengal Engineers earlier, and was the last serving British Indian Army Officer to hand over charge after Independence, and continued to serve here on the request of the new Indian government. (That Dr George prepared the checklists I know for sure because I have the correspondence and the accounts in my collection somewhere).

He then moved over to Bangalore, as the Director of the Indian Plywood Industries’ Research (and now, Training) Institute at Peenya. From a birdwatchers’ point of view, he vastly improved the garden of the campus (I’ve even seen open clump bamboos there, and Redstarts). And of course he started group birdwatching in Bangalore in 1972, after he came here in 1970. This was with Mr Perumal, the wildlife photographer, and his friend, the late one Mr Upendra, of the Automobile Association of Southern India.

Dr George during all his stay in Bangalore, both at IPIRI and later as a Consultant, was actively involved in developing adhesives for particle boards, essentially wood substitutes. And to this end he worked hard and achieved one technological innovation after another, and derived more for nature conservation than what most of us only dream of. Though people had made paddy husk boards in the laboratory, Dr George achieved the first ever commercial viability in the mass manufacture of paddy husk boards by developing adhesives which could be used in low enough commercially viable quantities. Within the last year he was actively developing new ‘green’, petroleum product free adhesives for the baton-particle-stem board industry. He had many patents to his credit, and a few more coming. He was also involved in developing standards for the Indian Standards Institution.

He was also the editor of the Wood journal for many years. Ever since the day the Newsletter for Birdwatchers was being printed, Dr George did the painstaking proofreading of every issue, a thankless job for which he was unfortunately not given adequate credits or attribution.

As others have mentioned he had a way of making people learn about birds. He would never ‘pronounce’ identification like many of us do in front of beginners, but would painstakingly encourage them to observe and note characters. And he was humble. However small the other person was (and I am punning the word small), he would never insist on his word and argue, showing great control and restraint.

As much as he was humble, he was also particular about quality, and had told me on occasions that the quality we had achieved would never do. He had vast experience in technical editing, having had to do that as a part of his job, and for his superiors, in his long career. He made me sit with him when he edited the Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Bangalore, constantly asking for clarifications and our intended interpretation of what we had written every few lines. In the bargain, if I recollect right, I got three weeks of free lunch and good work every afternoon, full time! And a few years before that, when we did our first annual mid winter water-bird count report of 1989, Oh my! What a learning experience! It was indeed a revelation that we could write so badly, and so candidly and confidently too! When I wrote my first note on the identification of warblers, he taught me to make the difference between time and space, and asked me what is it that I intended to say: that the Blyth’s Reed Warbler calls ‘here and there’ or ‘now and then’, when I had in my writing messed up between the two. Later, it was he who insisted on me doing up that note on warbler identification which Dr Subramanya so kindly and excellently illustrated. This, I remember, came after a presentation to the group after a birdwatching outing.

Dr George was a great gardening enthusiast. He used to collect wild flower seeds and make little packets out of these (‘potna’ as you call it in Kannada), which he used to give to us youngsters and ask us to go plant or throw the seeds in vacant plots. And I used to collect Ipomoea coccinea and Ipomoea quamoclit seeds from him in all those early years. On the last day that I met him on June 2nd, he lamented how nobody in his apartment compound and block was interested in the garden, and the difficulty he had in going out and physically supervising the work. They, obviously did not come up to his expectations! He, of course, was over ninety but was still going everyday to his laboratory to work, which he never gave up on.

He has left a legacy for Bangalore that is at least a thousand times more birdwatchers than he started out with. And, that in short, is Dr Joseph George for you!

 

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This note was originally written for the birdwatching community of Bangalore subscribed to the BngBirds email discussion group on YahooGroups. Feedback of the readers is gratefully acknowledged.

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An old photograph taken on his birthday with birdwatchers who went to wish him
1st October 1994

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Press coverage / abridged version:

Way ahead of his time

 

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