His observations documented several behaviors which were new to science, including the first documented example of play in birds. [91], By the end of 1914, Beebe's pheasant monograph was essentially complete in the manuscript. To plant a tree in memory of William D Beebe . This expedition marked the beginning of a shift for Beebe from ornithology to the study of tropical ecosystems. [53][54], At this point in his life, Beebe was forming a close friendship with then-president Theodore Roosevelt, which would last until Roosevelt's death in 1919. In October 1917, Beebe had his opportunity to serve in the war. In response to Beebe's dismissal, Horsfall retorted that he had been ill-treated by Beebe from the beginning of the expedition and that his subsequent actions had been for the express purpose of revenge. [71] The next ship took them to Singapore, where Beebe established a base of operations for the next stage of his expedition. [252] However, Hornaday never publicly expressed his disagreements with Beebe and did not hesitate to defend Beebe's work when others criticized it.[253]. [129] In 1925, Beebe set out on a second Galpagos expedition, The Arcturus Oceanographic Expedition,[130][131] backed by Williams and several other donors. Due to Elswyth's tendency to misrepresent her age, conflicting accounts exist of how old she was when she and Beebe were married,[155] ranging from 23[91] to 28. [15] At Columbia he studied under Henry Fairfield Osborn, and developed a close relationship with him which would endure until Osborn's death in 1935. [] One of the few things in the world of which I am really proud is that I know Will Beebe. [59][60] Beebe summarized this expedition in his book Our Search for a Wilderness, which was enthusiastically well-reviewed. His training work was halted when, veering to avoid a photographer who had run in front of his airplane as he landed, he crashed on landing and severely injured his right wrist. When he felt that the pressure of working under him had become too great, he would announce that his birthday was approaching, and his staff would have several days free from work to celebrate it. [57], In February 1909, Beebe and Blair traveled to British Guiana, in the hope that with Roosevelt's support, it might be possible to establish a permanent field research station there. [233] However, by 1959 his strength had lessened enough that long hikes and tree climbing were no longer practical for him, and he contented himself with work that could be conducted in the laboratory, such as dissecting birds' nests to analyze their method of construction. [72] After Malaya, the next portion of their expedition took them to Burma, where they arrived in Rangoon and traveled by rail to Myitkyina. Beebe was a well-known figure in the Roaring Twenties of New York City and was friends with numerous other well-known figures of the period, including Fannie Hurst and the cartoonist Rube Goldberg. [123] Beebe also discovered a previously unknown bay on Genovesa Island (also known as Tower Island) in the Galpagos, which he named Darwin Bay, and documented the diversity of animal life that inhabited it. [148] Within a hundred days, Beebe and his team had created a catalog of species inhabiting the area nearly as long as what had been assembled on the neighboring island of Puerto Rico in the past four hundred years. [268] One possibility is that although these animals indeed exist, so much remains to be discovered about life in the deep ocean that these animals have yet to be seen by anyone other than him. This study yielded a collection of 3,776 fish of 136 species, many of them also new to science. Beebe's study of these currents, and their effect on the climate of South America, is the earliest known study of the phenomenon known as El Nio. [269], In addition to his descriptions of new taxa, the crab Leptuca beebei (Crane, 1941), commonly known as Beebe's fiddler crab, was named in his honor. [10][11] During his high school years Beebe developed an interest in collecting animals, particularly after receiving his first gun at the age of sixteen, and trained himself in taxidermy to preserve them. [220][223] In honor of his lifetime of work as a naturalist, Beebe was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal in 1953. [47] With his many writings about the dangers of environmental destruction, Beebe helped to raise public awareness about this topic. Services for William "Bill" D. Beebe, age 76, of Enid, died, Sept. 4, 2020, are pending with Ladusau-Evans Funeral Home. It is now once again actively involved in research and an important gathering place for scientists. [34] In July 1903, at the request of a lawyer named Louis Whealton whom the zoo's director William Temple Hornaday regarded as a potential donor to the zoo, Beebe and Blair went on another expedition to Virginia's Barrier Islands. [117][118], Beebe was eager to undertake an expedition to the Galpagos Islands, intending to obtain more detailed data in support of evolution than Charles Darwin had been able to collect in his earlier visit. Beebe described his idea in a 1915 paper published in Zoologica, titled "A Tetrapteryx Stage in the Ancestry of Birds". To some men, the jungle is a tangled place of heat and danger. [234] Beebe also began to be afflicted with a throat ailment which may have been Sjgren's syndrome, although lacking a complete understanding of what caused it, Beebe and his doctors referred to it as "mango mouth". [4][5] Early in his life, his family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, where he began to acquire both his fascination with the natural world and his tendency to record everything he saw. William Beebe Obituary With heavy hearts, we announce the death of William Beebe of Enid, Oklahoma, who passed away on September 4, 2020. [166] Barton had the good fortune that years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had proposed a similar idea to Beebe, and Beebe approved of Barton's design. [213] He was by this point the only remaining member of the zoo's original staff,[214] and had produced more scholarly papers and publicity than any other employee. Following his Bathysphere dives, Beebe returned to the tropics and began to focus his study on the behavior of insects. William Beebe, in full Charles William Beebe, (born July 29, 1877, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.died June 4, 1962, Simla Research Station, near Arima, Trinidad), American biologist, explorer, and writer on natural history who combined careful biological research with a rare literary skill. [111][112] Volume II of the monograph was published in 1921, and volumes III and IV were published in 1922. [187], Beebe continued to conduct marine research after 1934, but he felt that he had seen what he wanted to see using the Bathysphere and that further drives were too expensive for whatever knowledge he gained from them to be worth the cost. Despite their failure to obtain their most sought-after prize, the expedition still returned with 280 live birds of 51 species, 33 of which were new to the zoo, although several of these died or escaped during the long trip back to New York. [104][110] In January 1919 Roosevelt, who was severely ill by this point, wrote to Beebe from his hospital bed congratulating Beebe on the publication of his monograph. [192], During the two Zaca expeditions Beebe was accompanied by his longtime assistant John Tee-Van as well as Jocelyn Crane, a young carcinologist who had first worked for Beebe at Nonsuch Island in 1932,[193] and who would subsequently be among Beebe's most cherished associates for the rest of his life. [124] During the return to New York from this expedition, Beebe continued to dredge animals from the sea, using a pair of new devices he had devised to assist himself with this: a "pulpit", an iron cage affixed to the bow of the ship that enabled its occupant to examine the surface of the sea more closely; and a "boom walk", a 30-foot (9.1m) boom jutting from the side of the ship from which he suspended himself. [281] In 1974, Beebe's property was donated to the newly established Asa Wright Nature Center. Beebe compared the knowledge that could be gained of the deep ocean from dredging to what a visitor from Mars could learn about a fog-shrouded earthly city by using a dredge to pick up bits of debris from a street. As birds collect about the luxuriant growths of a garden in the upper air, so hosts of fish will follow your labors, great crabs and starfish will creep thither, and now and then fairy jellyfish will throb past, superior in beauty to anything in the upper world, more delicate and graceful than any butterfly. [202] For these reasons, Beebe did not return to Caripito after his first season there. [220], Research at Simla formally began in 1950. Passed away at the Charles Lemoyne Hospital at the age of 62 after a brief but courageously fought battle. William Beebe's passing on Wednesday, November 23, 2022 has been publicly announced by Strano and Feeley Family Funeral Home in Newark, DE. [271], Gerhard Heilmann discussed Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis at considerable length in his 1926 book The Origin of Birds. For his contributions to science, he was elected a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [194] Like Hollister before her, Crane would eventually become Beebe's lover during the long expeditions that Beebe made without Elswyth's companionship. The publisher which Beebe chose for his work was George Witherby and Sons of London, as a result of their success publishing the artwork of John James Audubon. [100], Beebe was eager to serve in World War I, but at 40 he was considered too old for regular service. Predeceased by his father Ford Beebe, mother Anna Fraser Beebe, brother Dr. David Beebe, sister Janice Lise Beebe, niece Anna Beebe and brother-in-law Dave Lavallee. William Thomas Beebe. And when nerves have cried for a time "enough" and an unsteady hand threatens to turn a joystick into a signpost to Charon, the mind seeks ameliorationsome symbol of worthy content and peaceand for my part, I turn with all desire to the jungles of the tropics. [263], A lingering controversy exists in ichthyology over the validity of the four species Beebe described based on visual descriptions only, which he had observed during his Bathysphere dives. In 1923, Harrison Williams agreed to finance such an expedition, and Beebe was provided with a 250-foot (76m) steam yacht called the Noma for this purpose along with a support crew. Bill was born October 18, 1943 near Hennessey, OK to Othel "Oat" and Nellie McCartney Beebe and passed away on September 4, 2020 at his home. [8], In September 1891, Beebe began attending East Orange High School. After Elswyth died in 1984, Jocelyn donated Beebe's papers to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University's Firestone Library. [36], In December 1903, to avert another bout of Beebe's throat ailment, Hornaday sent him on an expedition to Mexico which would last until the following April. William C. Beebe, 49, passed away peacefully at Neighborhood Hospice in West Chester, PA on September 23, 2012. While 83 of the fish that he described were done so in a conventional manner, the remaining four were done so based on visual observations. His religion was largely the result of seeking to combine his sense of awe and wonder at the natural world with a scientific understanding of its workings. Explore Life Stories, Offer Condolences & Send Flowers. Very little of their early correspondence survives, but Elswyth had idolized Beebe for years, and her first novel Riders of the Wind was devoted to him. In a second study, Beebe performed the same task for a much larger area of jungle, approximately a quarter-mile (0.4 km) square. Beebe based this theory on his observation that the hatchlings and embryos of some modern birds possess long quill feathers on their legs, which he regarded as an atavism; he also noticed vestiges of leg-wings on one of the specimens of Archaeopteryx. Applying the same techniques to studying the Hudson Gorge that he had used in the Galpagos, Beebe encountered a surprising variety of sea animals, many of which had previously been thought to be exclusive to the tropics. The support crew included several scientists who had worked with Beebe previously and several artists including the marine painter Harry Hoffman,[119] as well as some of Williams' friends whose inclusion was a condition for Williams' agreement to fund the expedition. [156], Although Riders of the Wind was partially based on Beebe's pheasant expedition,[157] Elswyth did not enjoy Beebe's current research. The last chapter was written by Blair and was an explanation of how to plan and execute a vacation in the wilderness. [177] Beebe and Barton also obtained publicity for their dives from several articles Beebe wrote describing them for National Geographic, and from an NBC radio broadcast in which Beebe's voice transmitted up the phone line from inside the Bathysphere was broadcast nationally over the radio. [158] Bermuda's governor Louis Bols introduced Beebe to Prince George, who was fascinated by Beebe's books, and Prince George persuaded Beebe to take him helmet diving. [89] Despite her assistance during the pheasant expedition, Beebe excised any mention of her from the monograph he was preparing based on the data gathered during it. Elected a fellow in the world of which I am really proud that. 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