Dr. EDMUND CARROLL JAEGER - 1887-1983
From Palaver Invitations 51 - 75
by Jack Harris |
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Dr. EDMUND CARROLL JAEGER - 1887-1983
From Palaver Invitations 51 - 75
by Jack Harris |
|
|
Edmund Carroll Jaeger was born January 28, 1887 in Loup City, Nebraska.
He was the last of five children born to Phillip and Catherine Jaeger.
The treeless prairie of Central Nebraska was hardly a fitting classroom for this future naturalist, but he did the best he could sketching, pressing and preserving all the wild flowers and grasses hr found growing there. At the age of thirteen, the family with Edmund moved to West Point in Eastern Nebraska where scattered forested areas whetted his interest in other types of growing things. During his formative years, Dr. Jaeger,s father kept busy in his small general merchandising store while his mother, though busy rearing five children, found time to encourage young Edmund,s love of nature. On being graduated from high school at the age of fifteen, Dr. Jaeger and his family moved once again, this time to Des Moines, Iowa. Here it was deemed time for young Edmund to start earning a living. His teaching career, therefore, started in Runnells, Iowa, ten miles southeast of Des Moines. Here he taught all thirty- eight pupils in the eight grades of a one-room schoolhouse. After a miserably cold, wet and stormy winter in Iowa, the Jaeger family decided their future lay in warmer climes. They packed up to move to Walla Walla, Washington where glowing reports of moderate temperatures lured them on. Practically on the eve of their departure, however, a letter arrived from a friend in California with tales of the climate conditions there that made Walla Walla seem little better than Des Moines. With Riverside, California as their target, the Jaeger family, in 1906, with seventeen year old Edmund, now made their move. This was the year the Colorado River was overflowing into the Salton Sea and Dr. Jaeger remembered seeing the submerged Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Needing a California teaching credential to teach in the state, Edmund went to Los Angeles, took and passed the examination. His first teaching assignment in California was in the academy at San Fernando where the students, ages ranged from ten through high school. A couple of years later, with the help of a scholarship obtained by his father,s physician, Dr. Jaeger enrolled in the newly opened medical school at Loma Linda. For the next three years, six days a week, Dr. Jaeger pedaled his bicycle the eleven miles back and forth to his classes. Then a change in Dr. Jaeger,s plans for a medical career came about with a chance meeting of a Mr. Pilot who was the curator of the animal room in the phy siology department of the medical school. As a "moonlighting hobby," Mr. Pilot collected desert and mountain beetles for Lord Rothschild,s museum in England and was preparing a box of them to ship. Edmund happened by and was much impressed with the variety and their beautiful markings. A field trip to nearby City Creek in the San Bernardino mountains with Mr. Pilot, resulted in Dr. Jaeger deciding to switch his educational major from medical to zoology and botany. It was now 1911. After Dr. Jaeger,s father died on Edmund,s birthday, the 28th of January 1910, it was up to the now twenty-three year old Edmund to finance his further education. He obtained a teaching position as a traveling biology lecturer, taking his boxes of specimens throughout the schools of southern California. Then in 1912-13, he lectured for the Pasadena City Schools. Introduced to the small village of Palm Springs by Raymond Cree, superintendent of Riverside schools, Edmund taught ten students there. This was in 1915-16 with the one room school house built of cross-ties supplied by the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1916 Edmund decided he had sufficient funds to continue his college education so he enrolled in Occidental College at Los Angeles. Occidental College offered an excellent program in biology. Two years later, in 1918, he was graduated with a major in zoology and a minor in botany. Returning to Palm Springs after graduation, Edmund resumed his teaching career. In his spare time, after spending much of it in the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, he wrote The Mountain Trees of Southern California, later published in 1919 as his first book. In 1921 a teaching position opened in a Riverside, Cal ifornia high school. A year later he transferred to Riverside junior College where he was to teach for the next thirty years. At age 65, he retired with one regret, and that was that he had not retired five years earlier. With "leisure time" Dr. Jaeger was now busier than ever. He could devote full time to writing, traveling and lecturing. His first book The Mountain Trees of Southern California was closely followed in 1922 with his first desert book Denizens of the Desert. Then in 1929, Denizens of the Mountains followed in 1930 by A Dictionary of Greek and Latin Combining Forms were published. For a class he taught at the junior college he used as the textbook his 1938 publication The California Deserts. His profusely hand-illustrated Desert Wildflowers was published in 1940. This was followed in 1944 by A Source- Book of Biological Terms. A collection of intimate experiences with desert wildlife was presented in 1950 in Our Desert Neighbors. A Source-Book of Medical Terms published in 1953 was followed in 1957 by The North American Deserts, and A Naturalist,s Death Valley. Desert Wildlife published in 1961 was a revised version of Our Desert Neighbors. A Natural History of Southern California published in 1966 and A Biologist,s Handbook of Pronunciations in 1969 completed his list of published books. During the period from 1948 to 1963, Dr. Jaeger was a regular contributor to the now defunct Desert Magazine, contributing 110 articles. Dr. Jaeger was not one to collect his material from the efforts of others. All through his teaching years he spent most week-ends camped on the deserts of southern California. His vacations were spent farther afield in Baja California, Arizona and Nevada, Several trips to Europe, first by boat then later by plane expanded his horizons. Eventually he was able to visit all the deserts of the world except the Gobi, something he regretted all his life. Although Dr. Jaeger retired from his formal teaching career in 1952, he spent the remainder of his life teaching. Now his classroom was the desert itself. In 1954 he started his "Palavers," an outing for young men and for the purpose of sharing common interests in the desert and its environment. Initially an annual event, the Palavers proved so popular that his Baja California "cow-bell" began calling interested students together on a bi-annual basis. His early desert explorations lead him to new discoveries in the plant and animal kingdom. Several land snails, a millipede and the short-leaved Cima Dome Joshua Tree = Yucca brevifolia var Jaegeriana, bear his name. It has long been common knowledge among the Hopi Indians that the desert Poorwill spent its winters in a state of suspended animation. Their name for this bird "holchko" meant "the sleeping one." It took the naturalist Edmund C. Jaeger, however, to make the scientific tests required to prove that birds, at least the Nuttall Poorwill, did in fact hibernate. During the Christmas holiday of 1946, D. Jaeger and his ,two college companions, Jerry F. Schulte and Milton Montgomery, were exploring the rocky terrain near Desert Center, California, when they came upon this apparently lifeless mass of feathers tucked away in a niche in a granite boulder. Upon closer examination, and after the bird opened one eye, they realized the bird was alive so they replaced their discovery. Ten days later found Dr. Jaeger and Lloyd Smith back at the discovery site. The bird was still in its rock niche but after a few minutes of handling, stretched its wings and flew beyond their reach. The next winter, to his great surprise and joy, Dr. Jaeger found presumably the same Poorwill sleeping in the same spot. Now scientific observations could begin in earnest. The bird was banded, weighed and its temperature recorded. This continued every two weeks throughout the next three winters. A gradual loss of weight was noted each time and instead of a normal body temperature of 1060 F., a 670 F. was recorded. Needless to say, this discovery sent the publishers of scientific journals and encyclopedias back to their desks to re-write the chapters on bird hibernation. To set aside for all time a monument to this discovery, in 1965 Dr. Jaeger purchased in the Chuckawalla mountains eighty acres, and with the help of the Nature Conservancy, acquired another eighty acres on a long term lease from the Bureau of Land Management. This area is now known as the "Edmund C. Jaeger Nature Sanctuary." Dr. Edmund C. Jaeger,s long and productive life came to an end peacefully in his Riverside home on August 2, 1983. A cardiac arrest complicated by kidney failure ended his life after ninety-six years, six months and five days. His oft- repeated request that he be cremated and his ashes scattered over the Poorwill Sanctuary, was carried out by a group of his close friends on the morning of Sept ember 24, 1983. Dr. Jaeger will long be remembered because of his grants and scholarships to deserving students. To perpetuate his name, the Loma Linda Field Research Station in the Galapagos Islands and a Nature Reserve in the San Bernardino mountains bear his name. Likewise, the Natural History and Artifacts Museum at the University of La Verne, California and the Science building at Los Angeles, Lincoln High School honor Dr. Jaeger. Now, closer to home, on May 11, 1991, the Riverside City College Moreno Valley Campus dedicated a hillside behind the Humanities building to be known as the "Edmund C. Jaeger Desert Institute." The institute will feature an array of desert plants in a natural setting and serve as a learning center for science students. |
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