Dorothy Parker still vividly remembers the day she happened to look out the window of the family's North President Avenue home to see her 4-year-old son, Ted, calling to the birds.

"He heard the birds singing." she picks up the story. "Evidently he was trying to make the same sounds. I looked out and he had his hand out and a bird landed right in his hand.

"That was the very beginning of him loving birds. From that time on, that was his life."

Theodore A. Parker III hated for his mom to tell that story. And it would be tempting to dismiss the recollection as hyperbole.

Except for the fact that in becoming perhaps the most heralded field ornithologist of all time, Parker performed even more amazing feats.

For example, the man memorized and recognized the bird calls of all 4,000 bird species in the New World.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when he was still a young man, Parker was the lead star in blazing through South American countries, documenting vast and occasionally unknown bird species, and pleading for their conservation.

He met with leaders of Central and South American countries, including Cuba's Fidel Castro, making the case for setting aside the homes of so many bird species before they were lost. At a time when protecting jungles for their intrinsic value was still iconoclastic, he made notable inroads.

The shining star was snuffed out in a plane crash in 1993, while flying over a foggy cloud forest in Ecuador during a treetop bird survey. But by then the 40-year-old Parker had made a lifetime contribution to ornithology.

A reminder of that legacy surfaced anew recently when more than 10,000 of Parker's field recordings of 2,000 species of mostly birds, but also mammals and frogs, were made available to the public online through the considerable efforts of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library.

The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Parker helped set it up.

The woman the library is named after, Linda Macaulay, herself a prolific recorder of bird songs, got her start after Parker put a recorder in her hand.

Check out Parker's recordings by going to http://macaulaylibrary.org/....

Listen to exotic birds from around the world, from Antarctica to the Caribbean to the plains of Africa to the jungles of Central America to the mountainous treetops in the Andes.

Each was recorded by Parker and his trusty open-reel Nagra recorder. To this day, Parker's recordings are the best we have of many birds in the Neotropics.

Listen to the strange chatterings of an Adelie penguin on Paulet Island in Antarctica. Listen to the croakings of a brown pelican Parker taped in Louisiana.

Not everything is exotic. There are recordings of a northern cardinal singing in  Missouri and a wood thrush in Louisiana.

The listings often include a photo of the bird species and sometimes videos. That's Parker introducing each sound bite.

Parker spent the first nine years of his life on College Avenue. His mother recalls he often would run across the street to hang out at the North Museum.

He collected sea shells and butterflies. He could identify every flower and tree. "He was an all-round nature boy, I'll tell you," says his mother, a former city councilwoman.

But it was a passion for birds that set Parker apart.

He became a member of the Lancaster County Bird Club when he was 12. Like many promising young birders that rose through the club, Parker came under the mentoring wings of Harold Morrin of Millersville, who died this past Saturday.

Morrin was famous for dashing off on weekends to places like Florida and Canada to track down rare birds.

Jan Witmer, 75, of Ephrata, was along with Parker on at least three of those Morrin larks. On one, just as Witmer was getting into birding, the small group of local birders drove to Cape Henlopen, Del., in search of a little gull.

"There they are, three of them," Parker suddenly announced. Witmer was dumbstruck. All he could see were little specks a mile away.

"I asked how he knew," Witmer recalled. "He said by the flapping of their wings and their flight patterns. I thought, 'My goodness, these people are really good. What am I getting into?'"

Another time, Morrin was trying to add a mourning warbler to his life list, which already tallied more than 600 birds. The group had piled into Morrin's camper to try to find one that had been sighted in northwestern Massachusetts. They struck out. Then they headed over to New Hampshire. Nada.

Parker suggested they try Fundy National Park in New Brunswick. This on the same weekend, mind you.

They arrived around midnight and set the alarm for 5 a.m. The first bird Parker heard calling in the morning was the mourning warbler.

But try as they might, the group couldn't get it within sight. Parker disappeared, returning with a mourning warbler chick in his hand. He had followed the calling and located the nest, climbed up and borrowed a chick.

"He was without a doubt the most knowledgeable person in field identification of birds I'd ever met," says Witmer.

"A fleeting glimpse or a chipped note and he had it. He knew what it was long before it was seen."

Adds Witmer's son, Eric, 52, of Ephrata, who also was along on some of those memorable trips, "Ted was one of the few people that I've ever been out with where the birds seemed to come to see him."

Not surprising then that this was Parker's mantra: "The best way to find forest animals is to hear them. Walk quietly and listen intently."

So sound was Parker's reputation that among the two species of birds and four subspecies he discovered, one was found simply by Parker hearing it calling in the forest.

The Parker dusky-capped flycatcher is named after him. He wrote the definitive book on the birds of Peru, published in both English and Spanish.

When he was a senior at McCaskey High School, Parker became the first person to record more than 600 North American birds in a single year.

He furthered his ornithology career at the University of Arizona, then at LSU.

In 1990, Parker walked into the offices of Conservation International.

Parker recognized the profundity of the tropics and knew they were threatened. He proposed the idea of bringing together handfuls of top field biologists and sending them into remote areas for grab-and-run documentation of the variety of life.

To this day, CI's Rapid Assessment Program is being used to explore the world's most prolific and threatened tropical ecosystems. To date, the expeditions have uncovered more than 1,300 species of birds, plants and animals unknown to science.

The initial foray, which included Parker, a botanist, a plant ecologist and a mammalogist, lasted one month in Bolivia. It produced 402 bird species, including nine never before documented in the country.

So moved was the country's president that he declared a 4.5-million acre national park.

Parker's focus on vocalizations to identify birds revolutionized ornithology in the tropics.

On expeditions, the scientists carried so little food that they often ate the birds they caught in nets and traps. Parker learned Spanish and was learning Quechua, the language of the highlands of Peruvian natives, when he died along with three others.

Among those attending Parker's funeral in Lancaster was Roger Tory Peterson, the world's most famous birder.

In 1996, Theodore A. Parker III Natural Area was created by the Lancaster County Department of Parks and Recreation. The 90-acre ravine along Stewart Run southeast of Quarrville was a favorite trout-fishing spot for Parker as a kid.

Says his mom, "I'm so proud of him."
acrable@lnpnews.com
For a listing of outdoors events throughout Lancaster County this week and beyond, go to lancasteronline.com. Click on Sports, then Outdoors.