William Belton, Self-Taught Ornithologist, Dies at 95

November 5, 2009
William Belton, Self-Taught Ornithologist, Dies at 95
By MARGALIT FOX

Once upon a time, every tweet had an actual bird attached. If that bird
happened to live in southern Brazil, a region whose rich avian life was
long undocumented, chances are good that it was stalked repeatedly - and
its tweets, coos and whistles recorded patiently - by William Belton.

An internationally recognized ornithologist, Mr. Belton was almost
single-handedly responsible for the current body of knowledge of the
bird life of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost Brazilian state. His
field recordings and specimens from the region are today in the
collections of major research institutions. His two-volume study of the
birds of the area is widely considered seminal.

Mr. Belton's accomplishments are all the more unusual in that as an
ornithologist, he was completely self-taught. An American diplomat who
served in high posts in Latin America and elsewhere before embarking, in
retirement, on an ornithological career of more than 30 years, Mr.
Belton died on Oct. 25 at 95. His death, at his home in Great Cacapon,
W.Va., was from congestive heart failure, his son Hugh said.

Among Mr. Belton's most significant achievements was making more than a
thousand field recordings of birds, most in Rio Grande do Sul. Now in
the archives of Cornell University, his recordings document the sounds
of several hundred different species.

While many others have recorded birds in the field, Mr. Belton's work
was noteworthy for its methodical approach, its comprehensiveness and
the sheer length of time he devoted to it, associates said in interviews
recently. He first recorded the birds of Rio Grande do Sul in 1971,
lugging a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder and directional microphone.
He made his last recordings there in 1993, when he was nearly 80.

Each recording was often the product of hours of standing stock-still in
the wild at dawn, with swarms of biting insects for company. But the
rewards were considerable: over the years, Mr. Belton captured many bird
songs that had never before been documented.

"Many of these creatures are elusive: they don't really want you to be
close to them," said Greg Budney, the curator of audio at the Macaulay
Library at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, where Mr. Belton's
field recordings are housed. "You're dealing often with a rich
soundscape, with many other competing sounds, and you're trying to
isolate that target species. So it takes real fieldcraft."

Mr. Belton's recordings, many of which can be heard online, embrace the
firm boink-boink-boink of the dark-billed cuckoo, the amiable
squik-squik of the white-eyed foliage-gleaner, the wistful rising
halftone - D sharp, E - of the solitary tinamou, and much else. On most
recordings, the voice of Mr. Belton can also be fleetingly heard.

The bird names alone read like found poetry. Mr. Belton recorded, among
others, the variable screech-owl and the southern screamer; the
freckle-breasted thornbird, the sooty-fronted spinetail and the
rufous-browed peppershrike; the cattle tyrant, the masked yellowthroat
and the piratic flycatcher; the squirrel cuckoo, the laughing falcon,
the pectoral sandpiper and the gilded sapphire.

William Henry Belton was born on May 22, 1914, in Portland, Ore. He
earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford in 1935
and in 1938 joined the Foreign Service. Over the next 32 years his
assignments included Cuba, the Dominican Republic, South America,
Australia and Canada, where he became interested in birds through a
neighbor who was an ornithologist.

Mr. Belton attended the National War College in Washington in the late
1950s and was later deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy
in Canberra, Australia, among other posts. At his retirement in 1970, he
was deputy chief of mission in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr. Belton's first wife, the former Julia Hyslop, whom he married in
1939, died in 2003. He is survived by his second wife, Cornelia Brouwer
Lett Belton; three children from his first marriage, Hugh and Timothy
Belton and Barbara Yngvesson; eight grandchildren; and a
great-grandchild.

His books include "Birds of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil," published in two
volumes in 1984 and 1985 by the American Museum of Natural History.

Mr. Belton's field recordings have tremendous value for scientists,
conservationists and educators, his colleagues said. But they are
important for another, simpler reason: they can be lovely to listen to.

"There's a real aesthetic appeal to hearing the voices of these animals
from a totally different part of the world," Mike Webster, the director
of the Macaulay Library, said on Friday. "And people like Bill going out
and getting them and bringing them back so that people in New York City
or wherever can listen is a real service."

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