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Fall 2004 Departments
Exchange
Around the Pond
Great Sport
Arts
Books
Foundation News
Connections
Extended Family
Zip 01003
Features
The Future's So Bright
The Prince of Pages
The Changing Face of Beauty
Campaigns: Good for What Ails Us?
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Extended Family
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Souvenir
UMass Falcons, Then and Now
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–Vince Cleary
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IN 1912, AT THE AGE of 22, Robert L. Coffin came to work at Massachusetts Agricultural College as an assistant in Soils and Fertilizers. An avid naturalist and photographer, he soon began to establish himself commercially; by 1931 was taking most of the technical photographs at the college.
Coffin took the photo of the peregrine falcon eggs on Mt. Sugarloaf in South Deerfield on April 20, 1921. At the time, it was considered the best photograph of duck hawks’ eggs (another name for the peregrine) ever taken in the United States. The shot of the young peregrine chicks, at 10 days old, was taken less than a month later, in mid-May.
His son, Stewart T. Coffin ’52, published a loving memoir of his father the same year he passed away, in 1976. In The Good Earth’s Bounty he described the elder Coffin as “a self-trained botanist-ornithologist-entomologist, an artist and philosopher of sorts, view-camera specialist, highly individualistic if not eccentric, the last of the old-time naturalists.”
Just as Coffin’s pioneering photography survives, so do the UMass Amherst falcons. This year four peregrine eggs hatched in April in the man-made nest on the roof of the Du Bois Library. The chicks were banded in early June. Meanwhile, on Mt. Sugarloaf, where the falcons returned last year for the first time since 1953 and bred two young, the mating pair, for reasons unknown, abandoned their two eggs this year. |
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In Memoriam
A Delicate Balance
A Delicate Balance: larger image
Souvenir
Souvenir: more images
Destination Divas
Destination Divas: larger image
Woman, Interrupted
Woman, Interrupted: larger image
A Long Strange Trip
A Long Strange Trip: more images
It's Hip to Be Happy
It's Hip to Be Happy: larger image
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