Meet Henry Dresser, famous English scientist, former Musquash, N.B., resident

For bird-watching enthusiasts like Susanne Bonnell, New Brunswick's Musquash Estuary is one of the best places to enjoy the hobby.

"In southern New Brunswick, it would be, probably, one of my top ones as far as variety," Bonnell said.

The Saint John native has been visiting the area, about 20 kilometres southwest of the city, regularly for two decades. Sometimes she leads bird-watching field trips into the forests surrounding the estuary.

"Every time I take someone new out, they're saying 'I'm coming back, I'm coming back.'

"The number of birds we would see — warblers, flycatchers, vireos — as you walk through the woods, they are significant [numbers] and that's an important habitat," she said.

It's one of the big reasons that groups like the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Ducks Unlimited have been working in the estuary for years, and why the federal government declared it a marine protected area in 2006.

So it's the perfect place for a young, aspiring ornithologist to live and work, which is exactly what happened in pre-Confederation days.

Henry Eeles Dresser was born into a well-to-do English family about 11 months after the coronation of Queen Victoria, and he would  become one of the most famous ornithologists in Great Britain during the 19th century.

His collection, estimated at more than 12,000 specimens, including both bird skins and eggs, is spread over several museums today.

He also completed the nine-volume A History of the Birds of Europe, which took 25 years to complete and cemented his reputation.

When his personal copy came up for auction recently, the U.K. government took the unusual step of barring it from being sold outside the country, essentially declaring it a national treasure. 

The government valued it at 127,000 pounds.

But, it wasn't his interest in birds that brought Dresser to New Brunswick.

Henry McGhie, the author of Henry Desser and Victorian Ornithology: Birds, Books and Business, said the trip was strictly business, as was usually the case in those days.

 

Dresser's father owned the Lancaster timber mill in Musquash.

"His father at one point sent him out there because his uncle, who had been running the estate, was kind of under investigation," McGhie said in an interview from his Scotland home, "They thought he was maybe defrauding his father."

McGhie had access to Dresser's diary of his time in Musquash, and he said the business concerns clearly didn't stop the young man from indulging in his passion for bird collecting.

"I mean, to be honest, his diary is mostly about birds," McGhie said.

"He would be going off shooting grouse in the forests, he'd be off shooting birds. He used to get the younger guys to collect for him and he would pay them. He would train them how to make bird skin — study skins — so that after he left, they could continue to collect for him and send him specimens.

"And he talks about spending quite a lot of time … with the lighthouse keeper at Point Lepreau, George Thomas, going shooting ducks on the Musquash Estuary."

Now, if that sounds like an awful lot of gunfire to be considered scientific investigation, McGhie pointed out that in the New Brunswick of the 1850s, birds made up a significant portion of the daily diet.

"Of course, it's before the days of factory farming, and so people ate what they shot. So he talks about, you know, eating American robins, the thrush. They would eat these in the autumn time."

McGhie said he considers Dresser to be an early proponent of conservation of bird species and habitat, like most of the collectors of his day.

"They had personal experience because they travelled around, they'd seen what was happening with birds," he said.

"They also had the social contacts to speak to one another. They had the networks to understand the bird conservation laws in different countries. And so Henry Dresser was involved in setting up the Wild Birds Protection Act in Britain in the 1870s."

Dresser made two trips to New Brunswick in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and his business would take him elsewhere in North America and throughout Europe over his long lifetime.

Most of his so-called "American collection" can be found in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

McGhie said collections like that are very important to scientists today, and he points to how they were used back in the 1960s and 1970s to prove that the pesticide DDT was harming peregrine falcons and osprey.

"The way that people were able to study this was to go back and examine these old collections, dating back from kind of the 1850s onwards, showing that the the timing of the decline in eggshell thickness coincided with the big spread of DDT after the Second World War."

McGhie said it is very likely that Dresser's time in New Brunswick had a great influence on his later career.

"There's a 19th century idea, a Victorian idea called self-help. And it's the idea that people had a kind of obligation to make the most of their experiences," McGhie said.

"And Henry Dresser kind of fits into this model very well because he had these extraordinary experiences. You know, he went to Northern Europe, he went to New Brunswick, he spent time in Texas during the American Civil War. And whenever he was doing these things, he was kind of developing his scientific network, arranging to exchange bird skins. 

"It's a kind of form of capitalism, basically, where you developed your relationships, you developed your collecting and so on."

And the results of his collecting could help protect the Musquash Estuary in the future.

"I remember reading somewhere, it was something to do with the Musquash Estuary. And they were talking about how they'd managed to find historical records back to about … it was the early 20th century," McGhie said.

"But Henry Dresser's information is from, you know, nearly 100 years earlier. So, if we can look back further in time and bring all of the information together, it really does help us understand the continuity and the changes."