AOK BOD Spotlight of the Month: Michael Donnelly

How did you get started in AOK?

My friend Dick Seaton, knowing my interest in birds and the outdoors, invited me to join AOK and come to a Board meeting.  When we were trying to relieve Ron Klataske of the burden of putting together Prairie Wings so that he could concentrate more on urgent matters of advocacy and management of AOK sanctuaries, it seemed natural for me with my background in English to take on editing the journal.

What is your background? Have you always lived in Kansas (or Nebraska)?

I was born and grew up in Indiana.  I went to school in Massachusetts; there and in Maine, were my first experiences with the sea, and with the granite rocks and northern forests I came to love. My first job out of graduate school was at the University of Wisconsin, where a neighbor introduced me to duck and upland hunting, and a colleague got me into fly-fishing. I came to Kansas for a position at Kansas State in 1972, and driving out from Kansas City for my job interview, fell in love with the landscape of the Flint Hills. Later, I discovered Cheyenne Bottoms and Quivira, and a community of like-minded people in the NFHAS and among my colleagues at the University.

What is your most memorable AOK experience?

A visit to the Hutton Ranch for an AOK Board meeting in the Spring a couple of years ago.  For the first time, I saw first-hand what the AOK Sanctuary program could be and do, and fully bought in to Ron Klataske’s vision of a network of Audubon Sanctuaries like the network of sanctuaries in Massachusetts that was his inspiration.

What is your greatest conservation concern?
 

Wow—how to decide, there are so many, and so urgent.  I suppose the most comprehensive answer would be habitat degradation and destruction.  Everything else hinges on or contributes to that: loss of species, air and water pollution, the spread of urban sprawl, the introduction of foreign invasive species, the chemical poisoning of our lands, food, and water, the greedy or thoughtless picking apart of the web of nature.  And of course, behind habitat destruction as the most comprehensive answer, looms the larger issue of climate change and our human inability to curb the destructive effects of our consumerist, growth-obsessed, profit-governed way of life.

What gets you excited about nature?  What is your passion?
 

My Mother said my first words were, “Fehvehrs”[“feathers”]—the garment of the birds at feeders outside our windows.  My first copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America is inscribed “August 9, 1951,” when I was nine years old. About the same time I received not one but two copies of the quarto-sized edition of Audubon’s Birds of America for Christmas; I wanted to grow up to be a bird artist like Audubon, and enthusiastically produced many imitations of his artfully arranged bird portraits all the way through Junior High School.  (I finally realized, that just as the world needs only one John Milton, so it requires only one John James Audubon . . . .).  In sixth grade, asked my career aspirations, I answered, “To be a Professor of Ornithology at Cornell University.”  Though I was later seduced away from that ambition by the power of words and language, and the pageant and tragedies of history, the movements, the color, the sheer Otherness of birds fascinate me still.  And I have never felt more intimately woven into the web of life than in the half hour before dawn in the autumn marsh, hearing the waking grunts and croaks and calls of the marsh birds, smelling the rich atmosphere of water and plants and fertile mud and life, listening for the rush of wings overhead in the half-light, drinking in the sense of myriad forms of life surrounding me, forms that are not mine, but to which I can relate.  The total sensory engagement, watching and waiting in the marsh or working carefully through the uplands or the woods, with dog and gun or binoculars and field guide, transcends anything I can derive even from my beloved books, or performing Shakespeare on the stage.

What is your favorite spot in Kansas (or Nebraska)?

In Kansas, it would be difficult to rank these:  Cheyenne Bottoms during spring shorebird migration, and before the waterfowl have quite finished their visits; the tallgrass prairie whether on Konza, or Top of the World, or unspoiled hills on Ft. Riley; and the lake and field of wildflowers at Council Grove City Lake.  In Nebraska, I haven’t as many experiences for comparison, so the Hutton Ranch and Sanctuary would have to be at the top of the list.

How did you connect with nature growing up? 

My Mother always had bird feeders in winter, as did my paternal grandparents who were also accomplished flower gardeners, with Jackson and Perkins roses and House Wrens singing in the long summer days; I loved going to my paternal Aunt and Uncle’s home in the woods and ravines of Allendale outside of town to spend the night, and waking to hear Carolina Wrens and Summer Tanagers, and in springtime, hunting through the wet, leafy ravines for Wild Geranium, Dog-Tooth Violets, Mayapples, and especially the Bloodroot.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

Making Phi Beta Kappa in college, and winning the History and Literature Prize junior year.  Having taught the Honors Introduction to the Humanities course freshman year at K-State since its inception in 1986 until I retired in 2017, trying to share with some of the best students I have had the kind of intellectual experience that defined my own college years.  Teaching Milton and the Seventeenth Century literature of England to students, many of whom had had no previous experience (or interest!) in “earlier literature,” and planting seeds of pleasure and understanding that found some receptive and appreciative minds.  Teaching Paradise Lost (and indeed Milton’s life and works as a whole). While teaching Classical and Renaissance and Medieval Humanities, introducing to their cultural birth-right students who often had had no previous idea of what was owed them in their intellectual and aesthetic heritage.  Also, being able to bring playwrights’ words to life on the stage at the Manhattan Arts Center and in classes in Shakespeare and drama at K-State; and finally, in editing and over-seeing an attractive, professionally produced magazine that I think is worthy of AOK, in the last four issues of Prairie Wings.