Bird Man

BU Today

When it comes to high-risk activities, bird-watching doesn’t usually make it to the top of the list. But College of General Studies Professor Emeritus William “Ted” E. Davis, Jr., has faced peril more than once while observing birds for research or pleasure.
In 1965, Davis (GRS’66), who was 29, and his father were stalking grassland birds in Tanzania when their vehicle was charged by a black rhinoceros. (“We had a very good driver and he raced away from it,” he says.) But the scariest confrontation happened in Australia in 1990. He was a visiting research fellow at the University of New England (Australia), collecting foraging data about thornbills. While out driving one day, he spotted an eastern brown—a five-foot-long creature said to be the world’s second most venomous snake and one that is known to attack humans—slithering onto the dirt road ahead of him. “I hit the brakes, but I got so close to him that I lost sight of him,” he recalls. Davis peered out the window and suddenly found himself eye to eye with the snake, which had reared like a cobra. Fortunately, he’d rolled up the window seconds earlier; the reptile retreated.
“I have always heard that when people get terrified, they get this horrible cramp in the pit of their stomach,” he says. “That was the first and only time I’ve had that happen.”
Since retiring from BU in 2003, Davis has devoted most of his time to bird research. His lifelong interest in ornithology has taken him to more than 50 countries—sometimes accompanied by his wife, a biologist—and he’s seen more than 4,000 species of birds in the wild. (There are roughly 10,000 species in the world.) Despite all the traveling, he’s found time to publish histories of American and Australian ornithology—including Contributions to the History of Australasian Ornithology (published in ...

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