He had long, white
fingers that were agile for his age. One day he explained how to remove
the skin from a quail:
I wasn't going to discuss something that he had known for more years than I'd been alive -- which were quite a few. Even still, he had two and a half times my age.
a biologist friend told me. And when you open any book about Mexican
birds, you find his name there among the collaborators or in the acknowledgements.
I am not an ornithologist, but I heard his name for the first time twenty
years ago, when I started to work for DUMAC, and now I reverence him as
the maximum authority in birds.
Two years ago I finally met him in person. I was invited, more for friendship
than for my store of knowledge, to form part of the board of the newly inaugurated
Museum of the Birds of Mexico. Of course, Dr. Phillips was there. I didn't
expect to see him because of his age, but he came to as many meetings as
he could whenever he could hitch a ``rrride.''
He and I developed a certain affinity. To start with, we were the first
to take inventory of the little trays of candy that we placed on the table
while the minutes of the previous meeting were read. Only once did we sit
together, competing for the same delicacy. That day I bit my tongue and
decided to forget about the candy, knowing that Dr. Phillips enjoyed them
so much.
When the agenda was concluded, the dish was still intact.
In December of 1994, he heard me complain about the ecological error I committed of falling in love with someone from the West Coast. I protested about having to travel 1100 miles to celebrate Christmas with my in-laws.
A Spizaeta americana
is a little bird like so many others. It looks like a chilero except
it has a yellow breast and red strips on the wings. It flies in flocks through
cultivated fields. All this I had to consult from my field guide, because
when he talked to me about it, I hadn't the slightest idea it even existed.
There are 1,000 species of birds in Mexico and my greatest pride is distinguishing
between a magpie and a crow. From there on, all the rest are pretty much
the same.
Until I started to look for Spizaetas.
There was something in Dr. Phillips that made me think about my year-and-a-half-old
little girl. Maybe it was the way he moved the chocolates on the tray with
such delicacy with his index finger, looking for the green ones he liked
most. The spark in his ocean blue eyes. Dr. Phillips used reading glasses,
but he saw everything with his soul, from his interior and into someone
else's interior also. Like a child of a year and a half, with great curiosity
about everything.
In a meeting to which
he couldn't come, I suggested that we move our assembly place to the first
floor. I remembered Dr. Allison in the Tec and how she as a professor of
Hispanic-American literature had her office, not on the third floor with
the other professors of humanities, but on the first with the physicists.
She didn't want to climb stairs. But on another day Dr. Phillips gave me
his arm to go upstairs. It was curious that he always preferred to hang
on to someone... even me... instead of on to the bannister.
And once on top after fifty stairs, I discovered his pulse had accelerated
less than mine with the exercise. Now that he is no longer with us, I intend
to continue my campaign to move to the first floor, but for me.
Also I owe Dr. Phillips my green-winged garganeys. When I told him I wanted
to hunt a pair, he recommended, ``stay away from the dams and look
along the creeks. They go there when the other hunters scare them away.''
I was amazed that he was not amazed by computers. In one meeting I decided
to wow the council by showing the advances of technology and my project
for an electronic catalogue of the museum. I borrowed the most sophisticated
equipment and gave a demonstration that left them all agape.
All except Dr. Phillips, who ate two green chocolates during my talk.
The only thing I could give Dr. Phillips was a pair of quail. ``When
you go hunting,'' he told me, ``find me a few Callipela
squamata. I've got a friend in California that's studying something about
them in this region, at this time of year.'' And he proceeded to
teach me how to remove the skins. Then he indicated that to conserve them
there was ``nothing better that arsenic.''
I thought of the danger. Immediately the name of Agatha Christie
came to mind and I thought that having that poison in my house would present
too great a temptation to end my annual trips to the West Coast. Obviously,
having arrived at the age of ninety, Dr. Phillips knew how to handle it.
I decided to send the Callipeplas (Callipelas) frozen.
Five or six times I saw Dr. Phillips. But he touched my life as much
as my best teachers.
When I was a child, a friend of my parents' wanted to sell them a motorcycle
for me and invited them for supper. On their return, I was in bed but, of
course, awake. ``What time is it?'' I asked my Dad. I remember
that he came and sat on my bed. ``Look, son, I know you real well
and I know you don't want to know the time. You want to know what happened
with the bike,'' he said.
