This article is part of an ongoing series about the 19th and early 20th Century ‘Pioneers’ who laid the foundation for modern Chinese natural sciences, particularly ornithology.
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The pioneers of Chinese ornithology were not all consuls and customs men. A remarkable number were missionaries — people who came to China to preach and to teach, and who found, in the birds around them, a second and lifelong calling. Père David was the most famous of them, but he was far from the last. In the flat, dusty country around Beijing and along the Bohai coast, an American Congregational missionary named George Durand Wilder spent the better part of half a century watching birds, and in doing so helped produce the first serious inventory of the avifauna of the province in which China’s capital sits.
So who was Wilder?
George Durand Wilder (1869–1946) came to his love of birds early, and honestly. He grew up on the South Dakota prairie frontier in the 1880s, and as a young man served as a volunteer reporter of bird migrations for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Biological Survey — beginning, according to his family’s memoir, a lifelong practice of recording every species he observed each day. A scientist by temperament, he studied zoology, botany, geology, and mineralogy in college before taking his divinity degree at Yale in 1894. That same year he was ordained at Oberlin and sailed for China, travelling to Tungchow (Tongzhou), just east of Beijing. His career would run for some four decades, from around 1900 until 1939, spent largely in and around the North China plain — Tungchow, Tientsin (Tianjin), and the mission stations of the province then known as Chihli. He married Gertrude Stanley, herself a teacher and an accomplished amateur artist who would later paint many of the illustrations in his great bird book.
Wilder’s evangelistic and educational work was his profession, but ornithology became his enduring passion, and he pursued it with the patient, accumulating diligence that field study rewards. His handwritten field notes, now preserved at Cornell University, run from 1897 to 1943 — a near-continuous record of nearly half a century of observation in North China. Where a visiting collector might capture a season, Wilder captured the turning of decades: the same marshes, the same passage of geese and cranes, year upon year. That daily discipline, first learned on the Dakota prairie, never left him.
A Landmark Inventory
Wilder’s most important contribution came in collaboration with a younger fellow missionary, the Reverend Hugh W. Hubbard. Together, in 1924, they published the “List of the Birds of Chihli Province,” which appeared in the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society — the same learned society whose journal had carried Swinhoe’s early Formosan work more than half a century before — with an accompanying note in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club. It was the first comprehensive, annotated checklist of the birds of the province surrounding Beijing, drawing together the two men’s own extensive field observations into a systematic account of the region’s birdlife. For anyone seeking to know what birds occurred around the Chinese capital, and when, it was the essential starting point, and it laid the groundwork for all subsequent study of the region’s avifauna.
The partnership culminated, in 1938, in Birds of Northeastern China — a practical field guide of some 700 pages, based chiefly on studies made in Hopei (Hebei) Province, with field marks, notes on status, and distribution maps. It was published by the Peking Natural History Society, the hub of biological research in North China in the 1920s and 1930s, of which Wilder was a founding member and its first President. By the time of the book’s preparation, the authors could report that between them they had personally seen 405 of the 457 species then recorded for the province: a figure that speaks to the sheer depth of their combined field experience, and Gertrude Wilder’s illustrations gave the volume much of its character.
Wilder was no isolated amateur. He reviewed for The Auk, the leading American ornithological journal — including a review of The Birds of Hopei Province by the pioneering Chinese ornithologist Tsen-Hwang Shaw (Shou Zhenhuang) — and dealt with figures such as Josselyn Van Tyne of the University of Michigan. He corresponded with leading authorities abroad, among them the Japanese ornithologist Nagamichi Kuroda, and enjoyed warm friendships with Chinese and Japanese “bird men” alike; the growing regard between Wilder and Chinese scientists like Shaw marked, in its quiet way, the passing of the science into Chinese hands.
Peitaiho and the Great Migration
Perhaps the most enduring element of Wilder’s legacy concerns not a single bird but a place. Along the Bohai coast lay the seaside resort of Peitaiho (Beidaihe), where missionary families summered — and where Wilder recognised something extraordinary. The narrow coastal plain, hemmed between mountains and sea, funnels vast numbers of migrating birds along it each spring and autumn, including cranes and the rare Oriental White Stork. Through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Wilder documented this passage in a series of migration notes, and his and Hubbard’s work was perhaps the earliest to establish Beidaihe’s significance as one of the great migration watchpoints of East Asia. Decades later, in the 1980s and beyond, Beidaihe would become world-famous among birdwatchers for exactly the spectacle Wilder had first carefully recorded, drawing birders from around the globe to what became, for a time, a veritable mecca of Asian birding — a direct line from a missionary’s summer notebook to a site celebrated across the international birding community. Sadly, the Beidaihe of today is a shadow of its former self, its spectacle much diminished by coastal development and the draining and reclamation of the wetlands and mudflats that once sustained the migration. Yet the wider Bohai Bay coast on which it sits remains a hub for migratory birds of global importance — its tidal flats a critical staging ground for millions of shorebirds and other migrants each year — so that the phenomenon Wilder first carefully recorded endures, even as the place he knew has changed almost beyond recognition.
A Legacy in Names
Wilder never sought scientific fame, but recognition came to him nonetheless. According to his family’s memoir, he was honoured internationally by ornithologists, with three birds bearing the name wilderi in tribute to his having been the first to identify them. Such honours — like the “wilderi” epithet — placed a self-taught missionary observer, at least for a time, in the company of the professional describers whose journals he read and reviewed for.
A Life Interrupted, a Record Preserved
Wilder’s China years ended in the upheaval of the Second World War. He and Gertrude lived through the Japanese occupation of Peking and were eventually interned at the Weihsien Civilian Assembly Center in Shantung. Repatriated in 1943 aboard the exchange ship Gripsholm, the irrepressible naturalist spent the two-month voyage from Shanghai to New York cataloguing the seabirds he saw from the deck. He died in 1946, not long after a last, nostalgic visit to the South Dakota prairie of his boyhood.
George Wilder’s monument is of a quiet kind: a meticulous, decades-long record of the ordinary and extraordinary birds of the country around Beijing, a checklist and a handbook that gave the region its first ornithological map, and an institution — the Peking Natural History Society — that he helped bring into being. Every birder who today stands on the sea wall at Beidaihe watching the cranes stream south, and everyone who consults a modern account of the birds of Hebei, is heir to the patient watching of a missionary who, from prairie boyhood to a prison camp’s perimeter, never stopped taking notes.
References:
Wilder, G. D. & Hubbard, H. W. (1924). “List of the Birds of Chihli Province, with notes.” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 55: 156–239; and Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 49: 93–99.
Wilder, G. D. & Hubbard, H. W. (1938). Birds of Northeastern China: A Practical Guide Based on Studies Made Chiefly in Hopei Province. Peking: Peking Natural History Society.
Hemmingsen, A. M. (1951). Observations on Birds in North Eastern China, Especially the Migration at Pei-Tai-Ho Beach.
The Stanley–Wilder Saga (family memoir), Vol. V.
George Durand Wilder Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (Collection 3241).