Reflections from Flo McBride –
The CT birding community will want to join me and the other members of the New Haven Bird Club in remembering with affection and admiration Arne Rosengren, who passed away peacefully on May 10, at the age of 99. I’m collecting memories of Arne to put together for the club, and hope that people who knew him will email me their thoughts and stories about him at fmcb_warbler@yahoo.com.
Arne was an expert birder, a scrupulously accurate area captain for innumerable counts, and a serious student of birds who kept meticulous — and legible — records of his sightings; his field notebooks are now in the NHBC archives. He started the Lighthouse Point Hawk Watch, and shared his knowledge for decades as a field trip leader and birder.
He loved to help people learn about birds, and was unfailingly generous with his time. He would often stop to talk with birders and others that he met in the field, and would answer their questions and talk for just about as long as they wanted to. I first met him by telephone when I was just starting my serious US birding. Having learned that Harriet Miller was the president of the NHBC, I called her to ask for help with identifying a hawk perched in our back yard. She said, “The person you want to talk to is Arne Rosengren,” and gave me his phone number. Arne talked to me, a perfect stranger, for at least half an hour that day, and it wasn’t long before we were birding together a lot, often with George and Millie Letis and sometimes John Maynard, and later with Nancy Rosenbaum too.
I’m sure I’m far from the only person who saw special birds because of Arne. He showed me my first owls, in November, 1982 — two Long-eared Owls he knew about in the marsh at Lighthouse Point, followed by an unexpected Barred Owl near the park entrance. Then in November, 1983, he phoned to tell me that he’d gotten a call from Fred Sibley about a Snowy Owl on the roof of Harkness Hall at Yale, and we saw that one too; amazingly no passers-by were noticing it. In return, I was glad that I could show him some of the birds that I found at Lake Whitney, like a Red-necked Phalarope in May, 1982, and a Caspian Tern in May, 1983.
Arne was a real Renaissance man. He was fascinated by politics and read the NY Times every day, always walking to a nearby store to get it. A lover of Gilbert and Sullivan and of opera, he had a wide knowledge of those repertoires. He also knew well the popular music of the 30’s and 40′s, and once played me recordings of the a cappella singing group he was part of as an undergraduate at Wesleyan. It was fun to break into song with him once in a while. He loved baseball, and was a die-hard Red Sox fan, who looked forward every year to the start of spring training — and then, of course, to the return of the warblers. Also a master swimmer, for decades he swam at the Hamden High School pool every day it was open, and won medals in competitions.
A born storyteller, Arne gave some recorded interviews over the years. There’s one from 2020 about his birding that was condensed for inclusion in the NHBC’s 2021 anthology Chickadee Tales, where there’s also an edited transcription of remarks he made about the Lighthouse Point Hawk Watch during the dedication of the Hawk Watch plaque there in 1994. Another interview is a fascinating 1995 narrative of his experiences as a US Naval officer in the Pacific in WWII. Told matter-of-factly, it is a vividly dramatic story. A transcript of it was sent to me by Jean Maynard (wife of John Maynard), who recorded and edited it, and I’d be glad to email it as a pdf to anybody who’d like to see it. We can also watch the slide show Laurie Reynolds worked with others to create in 2017 for the NHBC’s celebration of his 95th birthday. It’s at https://youtu.be/AguIi3tcy0M.