Dave DeSante, a West Marin luminary of ornithology, died on Oct. 18 at the Marin Headlands. He was 80 years old.
Dave’s meticulousness and vivid passion led to major innovations in birding. His life’s work was a mighty portfolio of bird observations and data that spanned more than 50 years, covering the mountain passes of the Sierra in the summer and the outcroppings of the Farallon Islands in the fall. After his friend and fellow illustrious birder Rich Stallcup died in 2012, Dave held the longest list of birds ever spotted by one person in Marin County.
“Dave was part of a generational shift in how we look at the living world, especially in relation to birds,” said Claire Peaslee, a local wildlife biologist and naturalist. “‘We can use our binoculars. We don’t need shotguns.’”
Dave was born to a working-class family in Akron, Ohio. His father, a chauffeur and grounds-keeper for a wealthy widow, raised the family in a small unit on the woman’s estate. Dave was fascinated by birds and nature from a young age, but he turned his attention to engineering for his studies at Case Western Reserve University.
He got a job in Southern California’s booming postwar aerospace industry, but eventually lost it. A poorly healed neck injury helped him narrowly avoid the draft to fight in Vietnam and, after enrolling as a graduate student at Stanford University, he switched his allegiance to biology.
At Stanford in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Dave was exposed to hippie counterculture and formed a lifelong connection to the landscape, community and wildlife of Bolinas, where in 1970 he began working for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, now Point Blue Conservation Science.
“He told his advisor at some point that his studies interfered with his birding,” Dave’s longtime partner Eden Clearbrook recalled.
Dave became the last person to see a California condor in Northern California before the species went extinct in the wild in 1987. The prehistoric-looking bird was perched on a streetlamp in Palo Alto in a driving rainstorm. A condor hadn’t been seen in the area in decades.
One of the idiosyncrasies that drew Dave and other birders to Bolinas and the Farallones is the relatively high incidence of vagrancy, which refers to the appearance of birds well outside the boundaries of their normal range. For once-mysterious reasons, the lucky birdwatchers of Bolinas and Inverness often get the chance to spot specimens like a worm-eating warbler, whose normal range stretches from East Texas to Cape Cod, or a magnificent frigatebird, native to the Latin American tropics.
“If you’re a birdwatcher, the thing you want to see more than anything is something rare,” Bolinas birder and illustrator Keith Hansen said. “Dave found a pattern for finding rare, lost birds.”
Dave’s doctoral research in the Farallones, where the vagrant phenomenon is especially frequent, helped create an important theory. By capturing birds in wide paper cones and dyeing their feet with ink, he discovered that vagrant birds from the east weren’t flying randomly; rather, they were “misoriented” by an internal sense consistently guiding them in the wrong direction for migration. Instead of flying southeast toward South America in the fall, a misoriented landbird might instinctively fly northwest, ending up on the Pacific Coast. Misorientation, which Keith compared to a “directional dyslexia,” is more likely to afflict young birds in their first year of migration.
When an east wind is blowing and clouds are fully covering the islands, many such birds see the Farallones or Point Reyes as the only land for miles on their misguided voyage out to sea. On the islands, Dave found a Le Conte’s sparrow, a miniscule and rarely seen songbird of the Central Great Plains, and a Eurasian dotterel, a wader that typically doesn’t venture southeast of Alaska, among other vagrants.
After a spell teaching at Reed College, Dave returned to Bolinas to helm the land bird program at the bird observatory’s Palomarin Field Station. In 1986, he met Eden, an herbalist who was born in Paris. He became like a father to Eden’s daughters, Marie Grace and Eve Love, and the couple had a son, Forest, in 1988. The family lived in several homes between First and Second Valleys in Inverness, and would travel around California on nature expeditions, sleeping under the stars in Utah or camping in the Sierra.
“Dave was a mix of this strong scientific mind, and a loving man in a culture where males are supposed to be tough,” Eden said. In 1994, Dave and Eden separated, but they remained close friends. He moved into a house in Forest Knolls where he lived until his death.
In 1989, Dave founded the Institute for Bird Populations in a cabin in Inverness. The institute’s first initiative, the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship program, transformed the amateur birding practice of banding—attaching small metal tags to birds’ legs for identification—into a standardized conservation tool for monitoring bird populations on a vast scale. The MAPS program eventually generated more than 2.5 million records and helped provide insight into population declines and the human-caused problems afflicting birds.
“A lot of the banders were not happy initially,” said friend Peter Pyle, a biologist at the Institute for Bird Populations. “But it forced them to think about what they were doing.”
Dave had ample energy and a tolerance for the number crunching and grant writing that had to accompany the MAPS project. But the backbone of his life’s work took place high in the Sierra, at the Hall Natural Area near Tioga Pass. For more than three decades, he visited the craggy subalpine meadow, first with Reed students and later with I.B.P. staff, to document and map bird breeding during the summers.
His resulting study, published last year, found that global climate change had created extreme temperature variation at high elevations, causing declines in populations of Clark’s nutcrackers and chipping sparrows. In an accompanying article published by the American Ornithological Society, Dave described the decades-long study as a labor of love.
“What was so amazing is just how beautiful the subalpine, tree-line habitat is in the Sierra Nevada range,” Dave told the society. “What a gift to be able to live that way with a bunch of like-minded people, having a focus and living close to the earth. Oh man, what a lucky life!”
Dave died in the Marin Headlands doing what he loved: chasing a rare vagrant bird. Somehow, a willow warbler, a dusty yellow passerine that migrates across much of Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa but never to the Americas, had made it to Marin. Dave and Keith had arranged to meet at Rodeo Lagoon, where the bird had been spotted, but Keith left early. Later, while hiking up a hillside with a group, Dave’s heart gave out. His ashes will be spread at the Hall Natural Area.
Dave is survived by his son, Forest; his daughters Marie Grace and Eve Love; his grandchildren Tyler, Quinn and Jalen; and his longtime partner and friend Eden Clearbrook.