We are posting this on behalf of Glenn Coady about the passing of Fred
Bodsworth, author of Last of the Curlews.

Jean Iron and Ron Pittaway

The following death notice appeared in Monday's Toronto Star:

BODSWORTH, Fred,
Celebrated Canadian Author, "Mr. Curlew" died September 15, 2012, one month
short of his 94th birthday. He was predeceased by his loving wife Margaret
Banner. Dear father of Barbara Welch (Ed), Nancy Hannah (Rick), and Neville
Bodsworth (Lois Mombourquette). Cherished grandfather of Wendy, Erin, Lisa,
Lori, Tyler, Tara, Margaret, Aidan and Cameron. Doting great grandfather of
Cristian and Holden. Fred was a self-taught scientist with an insatiable
curiosity for the natural world and a life-long passion for birds. There
will be a private family service. Friends are invited to join us at the
Bracebridge Sewage Lagoons (Kerr Park) on Sunday, October 7, 2012 for a hike
in Fred's memory. We will meet at Kerr Park at 9 a.m. for brunch with a hike
to follow. A Memorial Service in November will be announced later.
Charitable donations can be made to Ontario Nature, Bird Studies Canada or
Canadian Nature Conservancy. Online condolences may be sent via
www.sherrinfuneral.ca

Glenn Coady wrote this tribute:

Charles Frederick "Fred" Bodsworth was born on October 11, 1918 in Port
Burwell, Ontario. Fred graduated from Port Burwell public and high schools
and went on to a career in journalism, working freelance for the Port
Burwell Enterprise, London Free Press and Woodstock Sentinel-Review during
the Depression, as a full-time reporter for the St. Thomas Times-Journal
1940-1943, a reporter and editor for the Toronto Daily Star and Weekly Star
1943-1946, and staff writer and editor at Maclean's Magazine 1947-1955.
Since 1955, Fred had pursued a career as a freelance writer and editor,
publishing four novels: Last of the Curlews (1955, Toronto and New York,
Dodd Mead); The Strange One (1959, Toronto and New York, Dodd Mead); The
Atonement of Ashley Morden (1964, Toronto and New York, Dodd Mead); and The
Sparrow's Fall (1967, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart and New York,
Doubleday). Fred also wrote and edited for several non-fiction titles
including: The People's Health: Canada and WHO (with Brock Chisholm) -
Canadian Association for Adult Education, Toronto, 1949; The Pacific Coast
volume of the Natural Science of Canada series, 1970; and Wilderness Canada,
Clark Irwin, Toronto, 1970. In the spring of 1954, Fred wrote a short
novelette for the May 15th issue of Maclean's magazine entitled "Last of the
Curlews", accompanied by illustrations by well-known editorial cartoonist
Duncan Mcpherson. In that era, Maclean's magazine was a far more literary
publication than it is today, more akin to the New Yorker than to a news
magazine like Time, as in its current incarnation. Many of Canada's most
famous and successful writers often published short pieces of fiction in its
pages. When "Last of the Curlews" was published in Maclean's, the
overwhelming positive reader response far eclipsed that of any other work
the magazine had ever published, and Fred was encouraged to expand the work
into a larger novel. The completed novel version of "Last of the Curlews",
accompanied by over 40 peerless scratchboard illustrations
by artist/naturalist Terry Shortt, provided a fictionalized account of the
last pair of Eskimo Curlews, and was published by Dodd Mead in February
1955, and was immediately received enthusiastically by the public. It has
since been widely cited as one of the finest pieces of natural history-based
fiction ever written. The book's genius is that it transforms the reader's
appreciation for the extraordinary life experiences that migratory birds
encounter and the challenges they must overcome on a daily basis. It uses
the tragic story of the Eskimo Curlew as a parable to impart a sense of both
the gravity of extinction and the sinister role played by the often wanton
hand of mankind on the natural world. The book was chosen for inclusion as a
Readers' Digest novel selection and eventually went on to sell in excess of
three million copies - an improbable result for a love story with no human
characters or dialogue. In all the years since it was first published, it
has never been out of print. The book has been translated into twelve
foreign languages and was adapted into an animated film by Hanna-Barbera
Productions that first aired on the American Broadcasting
Corporation's After School Special on October 4, 1972. It won an Emmy Award
for Outstanding Achievement in Children's Programming in 1973.

Fred made incalculable contributions to natural history in Ontario. His love
of nature started as a very young boy with an interest in butterflies, and
later birds, in his hometown of Port Burwell. In what might almost be
considered heresy for any Canadian boy of that era, Fred traded a pair of
his skates and a bicycle pump for his first butterfly guide - obviously it
was clear pretty early on where his priorities lay. His correspondence on
natural history matters stretches back even to a personal relationship with
W.E. Saunders, the legendary London-area naturalist of the late-19th and
early 20th centuries and one of Fred's early heroes. In the summer of 1949,
Fred discovered the first Hooded Warbler nest for Canada at Springwater
Conservation Area near Aylmer. In the 1960s and 1970s, Fred was a
much-sought leader of worldwide ornithological tours. Fred's own lifetime of
personal ornithological records were heavily drawn upon in the production
of a 2004 monograph "Birds of Elgin County - a Century of Change". Fred was
a long-time Director and former President (1965-1967) of the Federation of
Ontario Naturalists (now Ontario Nature), an Honorary Director (since 1970)
of the Long Point Bird Observatory and Bird Studies Canada, and Chair of the
Board of Trustees of the James L. Baillie Memorial Fund for Ornithology
(1975-1989) - very appropriate, since Jim Baillie had been a friend of his
for several decades. Fred was one of the longest-serving members of the
Brodie Club (since 1953), the Toronto Ornithological Club (since 1949;
becoming an honorary member in 2002) and the Ontario Field Ornithologists
(since 1983) at the time of his death, and he always thoroughly enjoyed
the meetings of each of these clubs, where he was still a regular attendee
into the summer of this year. True to Fred's style and sense of whimsy, his
90th birthday party was held in a park that featured a tour of the
Bracebridge, Ontario sewage lagoons. Among many speeches made after a walk
around the lagoons, Fred delivered the line of the day when he finished his
speech with the line "Oh, to be 80 again ! .....".

There is likely no better way to describe Fred's novels than by using his
own words:

"The major part of my work has been novels linking human and animal
characters in a fiction format with strong natural history content and
wilderness backgrounds. The nature storyteller who uses birds or mammals in
fictional situations treads a narrow path if he wishes to be scientifically
authentic and portray them as they really are. On the one hand, he has to
personalize his animal as well as his human characters or he simply has no
dramatic base for his story. Yet if the personalizing of animal characters
goes too far and begins turning them into furry or feathered people - the
nature writer's sin of anthropomorphism - the result is maudlin nonsense
that is neither credible fable nor fiction. I enjoy the challenge of
presenting wildlife characters as modern animal behaviour studies are
showing them to be - creatures dominated by instinct, but not enslaved by
it, beings with intelligence very much sub-human in some areas yet
fascinatingly super-human in others. Out of the blending of human and animal
stories comes the theme that I hope is inherent in all my books: that man is
an inescapable part of all nature, that its welfare is his welfare, that to
survive he cannot continue acting and regarding himself as a spectator
looking on from somewhere outside."

I cannot envision capturing the essence of Fred's writing more completely or
eloquently. The impact of Fred's writing, particularly that of Last of the
Curlews, was equally as influential as Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac
(1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) in the stirring up of a
collective ecological conscience among society that gave impetus and urgency
to the popular post-War environmental movement.

One of my favourite pieces of Fred's writing is an article entitled "Why
Wilderness?", a call to arms for enlightened wilderness preservation, which
was published in the December 1967 issue of The Ontario Naturalist. Here is
one of my favourite passages:

"Conservationists are not trying to stop progress, or to halt further
development of soil and forest resources; but if we believe that man's
heritage includes not only the works of man but also the works of creation,
we have an obligation to the future to ensure that good samples of
creation's multiformity of natural patterns are preserved. To argue that
wilderness preservation is ludicrous because we already have too much
Canadian wilderness is like arguing that we don't need to preserve our Tom
Thomsons or Krieghoffs because we have galleries full of other paintings."


Perhaps the most telling fact that I could share about Fred's life is that
among the many hundreds of friends and acquaintances that I have shared with
Fred over our friendship of several decades, I have never heard a single one
of them utter anything but praise and admiration for his knowledge, wisdom,
infectious inquisitiveness, sense of both humour and fairness, and his love
for family, community, birds and the environment. That truly is the
exemplary hallmark of a life well lived.

Fred passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 15th at Toronto's
Scarborough General Hospital.

I learned the intricacies of shorebird identification leaning heavily on
books crafted by men named Fuertes, Forbush, Peterson and Godfrey, but fully
comprehending them as "minute specks of earthbound flesh challenging an
eternity of earth and sky" was a gift bestowed on me by Fred Bodsworth.

A fond adieu to my friend Fred - he will be dearly missed by countless
friends and fans alike.

Glenn Coady
Whitby, Ontario

Please join Fred's family and friends at Kerr Park in Bracebridge for a
brunch and hike in his honour on Sunday, October 7th at 9:00 a.m. To reach
Kerr Park and the Bracebridge sewage lagoons, take Highway 11 north to just
south of Bracebridge and exit at Exit 182 onto Regional Road 118 (Ecclestone
Drive), taking it northwest 4.2 km to Regional Road 16 (Beaumont Drive).
Turn left (west) onto Beaumont Drive and proceed 0.6 km west to the entrance
to Kerr Park on the south side.