Dr. Richard D. Taber Receives The Wildlife Society’s Highest Honor,
The Aldo Leopold Award
Dr.
Richard Taber has been an active participant in wildlife conservation from shortly after World War II through the present.
He was born in San Francisco, California in 1920 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1942 with a degree in Zoology. He then joined the Marines where he served as a Commissioned Officer through 1946. He then moved to the Midwest where he enrolled as an MS student under Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin; he worked as a Conservation Aide with the Wisconsin Conservation Department at the same time. It was during this time in Wisconsin that Dr. Taber published his first papers in 1946 on observations he made of wintering birds in Alaska while in the Marines and on dickcissels in Wisconsin. When Professor Aldo Leopold died in 1948, Dick completed his MS on ring-necked pheasants under Joe Hickey in 1949.
Dick moved back to the Bay Area in 1949 and completed his Ph.D. working with A. Starker Leopold in 1951. He worked as a Research Zoologist for the California Forest and Range Experiment Station and as an Acting Assistant Professor of Zoology at Berkeley through 1956. It was during this time that Dr. Taber began his long-term working relationship with Aldo Leopold Award-winner Raymond Dasmann. In 1956, Dr. Taber accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana. He rose through the ranks at Montana to Professor, Assistant Leader of the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, and Associate Director of the Montana Forest and Range Experiment Station. He spent a year as a Fulbright Research Professor at the West Pakistan Agricultural University in Lyallpur during his 12 years at the University of Montana. In 1968, he moved to the University of Washington, Seattle, where he served as Professor of Forest Zoology and Wildlife Science through his retirement in 1985. He moved back to Missoula in 1986, where he has served as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington and as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Montana. He continues to live in Missoula today.
Dr. Richard D. Taber certainly fits the criterion of “distinguished service to wildlife conservation.” The series of papers on black-tailed deer in the chaparral of California published by Taber and Dasmann and Dasmann and Taber in the mid-1950s through the 1960s are classics in our field dealing with population dynamics and nutrition-range relationships. Dr. Taber authored and/or co-authored chapters in the Second, Third, and Fourth Editions of the Wildlife Management Techniques Manual; he published a chapter in a techniques manual published in India, as well. Because of this, Dr. Taber’s work is on the bookshelves of most wildlife biologists in the world.
Dr. Taber participated in wildlife research and conservation in many parts of the world, most notably in Chile, Pakistan, India, Taiwan, and in Europe. Wherever he went, Dr. Taber worked within the local cultures and with local people to further conservation. Many of the individuals with whom he worked in these areas were later co-authors with him.
Dick Taber has a huge group of extraordinarily loyal former graduate students located around the world. During his 3 decades as a professor in academia, he mentored 17 doctoral students and more than 100 M.S. students through to completion of their degrees. For those people not in academia, these numbers are very high. Many of these former students are currently in influential positions in wildlife conservation in North America.
From his first papers in 1946, Dr. Taber continues to publish through the present. His recent book (Taber, R.D., and N.F. Payne. 2003. Wildlife, Conservation, and Human Welfare: A United States and Canadian Perspective. Krieger Publishing Co. 218 pp.) traces the evolving relationship between humans and wildlife from the Stone Age through the present. This book received an excellent review by Gerald Zuercher in the Wildlife Society Bulletin in 2004. He is currently working on another book on the mammals of Taiwan with a former graduate student; they hope to have the book out in the next year or two.
Through his work as a researcher in many parts of the world, his many scholarly publications, his dedication to education as demonstrated by his more than 100 graduate students and thousands of undergraduate students, and his exploration of the relationships between humans and wildlife through the ages, Richard D. Taber certainly demonstrates “distinguished service to wildlife conservation” throughout a long career. Dr. Taber is now 85 years old and his career demonstrates that he was greatly influenced by his graduate advisor, Aldo Leopold.
There can be no more than a few of Leopold’s former students left; Richard D. Taber’s life and career embodies the scientist-educator-citizen model of Aldo Leopold. While most
people in the wildlife profession would like to consider themselves to be
students of Leopold in spirit, Dick Taber actually was a student of Leopold’s,
both literally and in spirit.
2008