Samuel Chambliss: 

Wetlands and Rhinos

Sam Chambliss had always been fascinated with nature and the environment, but unlike most people he made both his life’s mission — from fighting as a lawyer to protect Connecticut’s open spaces to acquiring a huge ranch in Zimbabwe to protect rhinos, elephants and other wildlife.

Samuel Mauldin Chambliss was born in New Jersey in 1929, graduated from Bucknell University, and earned his doctor of law degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to earn his master’s in military law from the Judge Advocate General School at the University of Virginia. He then served in Germany as a captain in the JAG Corps of the U.S. Army.  

For a while, he practiced with the family firm in Chattanooga, Tenn., co-founded by his grandfather. He later moved to Connecticut where he continued his legal practice in Westport before settling in Ridgefield, becoming a specialist in the emerging field of environmental law.  

Two of his major clients were in the town of Redding, where he served as attorney to the Conservation Commission and the Redding Land Trust.

His reputation was such that, at the request of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, he wrote the first draft of the Connecticut’s Inland Wetlands Act, which to this day governs land uses in wetlands. 

He and his wife, Janet Bavier Parris, visited Zimbabwe in 1983, and fell in love with the countryside. In 1985 they bought 18,500 acres of African savanna and moved there permanently in 1987 when the the government asked them to be custodians of that country’s endangered black rhino.

The Chamblisses and two neighboring landowners enclosed their property with an electric fence, creating a 60,000-acre preserve.  

“We’ve got zebra, waterbuck, kudu, impala, reedbuck, elands, and the tsessebe, which is the fastest antelope in the world,” he told The Press in 1989. “There are also leopard and cheetah.”

However, “right now, one of the big things is to save the rhino, and Zimbabwe is just about the last country where there is a significant rhino population,” Chambliss said.

The rhinos the Chamblisses were trying to protect weren’t the friendliest of creatures. Soon after they set up their reserve, the government trucked in a black rhino that, threatened in another part of the country, had been captured and put in a crate for transfer.

“It came out of the crate and it had enough of being cooped up. It was looking for something to damage,” Chambliss said.

“Someone had left a pickup truck with two dogs in it parked nearby. After the first time he hit it, the truck bounced up and down on its shocks, which convinced the rhino it was alive.

“He kept jabbing his horn between the truck and the front tire. Finally he hit the tire, which gave up the ghost with a loud sssss.

“He kept right on killing the truck, till finally his horn came out through the top of the hood.

“We were all up trees like ornaments,” his wife, Janet, said. “Sam was up a tree, but only about five feet up, and someone told him to go higher. Eventually, the rhino got around to him and rammed the branch where he had been standing.”

After the rhino was through with the pickup and several treed bystanders, the animal turned on the 18-wheeler that had brought him.

After the rhino attacked the big truck, it “didn’t move,” Chambliss said, “and the rhino assumed it was dead. After a while he wandered off into the bush.”

Elephants provided a more pleasant experience. “We got 10 calves with the idea of starting our own little elephant herd,” he said. “But all 10 turned out to be males, even though they promised us three females.”

Janet Chambliss led the elephant raising, feeding them milk in pans. “They are very dependent and they bond to you,” she said. “When we first got them, after about a week, i went in and sat down cross-legged with them in an area we had set aside for them to sleep. One baby elephant lay down and put his head in my lap.

“They sort of decide you’re their mom.”

Their African paradise came to an end in 2003 when the government of Zimbabwe, which had begun confiscating property owned by white people three years earlier,  finally took over the Chambliss ranch.  After many tribulations, Sam and Janet Chambliss fled the country and, almost penniless, eventually settled in Gonubie, South Africa, in 2005.

In 2012, with Mr. Chambliss ailing, the couple returned to the United States so he could undergo medical treatment. He died in Florida in 2014 at the age of 84.

Shortly after his return to this country, he was asked whether he would write about his experiences in Africa. He said he might, The Press reported,  “but that people wouldn’t believe the horrors of Zimbabwe.” 

Wings and water

Early March is when many water-loving birds return to the Northeast: Red-winged Blackbirds, Kingfishers, and several kinds of ducks, for instance. Swamps, streams, shorelines and ponds are a draw for the first migrants because they offer food from the earliest bits of new life as well as from some leftovers of old life.

As soon as the ice and snow begin to thaw, insects such as carrion-eating flies start to appear in the air and others emerge in the water. Fish, once protected by ice, become exposed, and amphibians like salamanders and spring peepers crawl out of their winter beds. Plants that like wet feet become accessible in the water and begin to grow in the swamps.

Wetlands also offer treats left from last season in the form of berries and seeds still held by plants like buttonbush. The bush’s aged but still tasty fruits are designed to attract the hungry migrants. The birds eat and soon “plant” the seeds, complete with fertilizer, far from the mother bush and just in time for a new growing season.

Fisher food

In recent years townspeople have reported sighting fishers, the 10- to 15-pound weasel-like martens that have been making a recovery in the region.

Their appearance is no accident. In 1988, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection bought a bunch of live-trapped fishers from upper New England, and released them in western Connecticut. The aim was to restore an animal that had once been native to the state, but had been driven away by the agricultural deforestation and perhaps overtrapping. Today, fishers are found throughout the state and are doing so well, licensed trapping is allowed in the fall.

While fishers don’t fish – or even eat fish, they do love a tasty porcupine. That thorny fare is in rather short supply, however, so they have turned to a more abundant mammal for food: The squirrel.

In fact, in northern Vermont and New Hampshire, where the fisher was never extirpated, squirrels are much less common than they are here. The natives say it’s because the fishers keep them under control – good news for anyone who’s ever had squirrels invade their home.

They’re coming…

It’s tough being a commuter, traveling winding back roads and crowded expressways at dawn and dusk. Visibility is often poor as headlights shine in your eyes and perhaps rain, snow or fog blur your vision. Through all this, you must constantly keep alert for deer, which seem suicidally bent on throwing their 200-pound bodies at you.

Now come warnings that moose on the move, extending their territory well into Connecticut and southeastern New York. And the difference between a moose and a deer is like the difference between a Doberman and a Chihuahua.

In September, a car struck and killed a 700-pound bull moose at Barkhamstead in upstate Connecticut. A month early, a crash killed a 500-pound moose in Goshen. These weren’t even “big” ones – moose can reach 1,100 pounds.

Connecticut wildlife experts estimate more than 100 moose are now in the state and their numbers are growing as their range extends southward toward metropolitan New York City.

What’s a motorist to do? The best advice is: Slow down! Be it deer or moose, or maybe even a 400-pound bear, the slower you’re going, the less the impact. You may even be able to avoid an impact altogether.

Beauty in the beast

Each fall, the Turkey Vultures return. Often roosting in roadside evergreens, they may be drawn there by area's wealth of carcasses of deer, squirrel, possum, and other creatures fallen victim to the car.

Some also get a seasonal treat. At least one family places the family turkey, picked clean after Thanksgiving dinner, in the back yard each year. Like clockwork, the vultures appear to pick it even cleaner.

In the air, few birds can match the vulture’s beauty. They glide for miles on outstretched, six-foot wings that rarely flap – soaring, angling, dipping, and rocking, all as effortlessly as a goldfish in a pool. Sliding over the treetops as they approach their roost, they are like so many 747s arriving at an airport.

Close-up and on the ground, however, the vulture looks like a character from a horror movie. With the black body of a fat undertaker, the huge bird bears a featherless, big-beaked, red-fleshed head – all the better to dip into the corpses with.

Sometimes beauty is not only in the eye, but in the distance of the beholder.

Whoooo is there?

Interested in riding around in the middle of the night, emitting strange sounds in the woods and fields? If so, Connecticut wants you.

Concerned about the future of owls in the state, the Department of Environmental Protection has begun surveys to get a sense of their numbers, distribution, habitat, and habits in general. The problem with owls, of course, is that they are mostly nocturnal and are hard to see, so relatively little is known about them.

Volunteer surveyors hit the road at midnight with special sound equipment that broadcasts the calls of Barred, Northern Saw-Whet, Great Horned, Eastern Screech, and Barn Owls. They play the calls and hope for responses. This year, teams traversed 13 routes with 130 survey points, and got responses at 30 locations.

They found more than 30 birds – but no Barn Owls like the one above. Perhaps like the buildings they are named for, Barn Owls are disappearing, too.

If you don’t mind night work and would like to help find whooooo’s around Connecticut, call Shannon Kearney-McGee, 860-675-8130, to volunteer for the 2007 owl survey.

Birds at night

Where do birds go at night – especially in the winter?

When heading off to sleep, birds are looking for protection from two things: enemies and the elements. Because of this – and, of course, the fact that it’s dark out – people rarely see sleeping birds.

Diurnal birds – those active in the daytime – have various ways of spending the night. Many small songbirds simply find a branch in a convenient tree to protect themselves from wind, rain and snow. Some favor thick bushes and shrubs. Many like spruces, hemlocks and other evergreens whose needles provide a degree of year-round protection. Cavity dwellers, such as woodpeckers and wrens, may make use of holes in trees or among rocks or fallen trees.

Outside breeding season, many songbirds such as robins, bluebirds and even cardinals will gather in flocks and sleep together. Some birds, such as crows, vultures, and starlings, will roost in great numbers. Roosts provide protection in numbers as well as a modicum of heat generated by all the bodies being fairly close together.

Gull, ducks and geese will float on water at night, usually in groups, while some shorebirds will settle down for the night on a relatively remote beach or in grass at the edge of the shore.

Some birds, such as Common Redpolls, ptarmigans and Ruffed Grouse, will bury themselves in snow at night, taking advantage of its insulating quality. It was a technique emulated by North American Indians as they journeyed away from camp in winter.

Fishing for cats

A century ago our suburban countryside was largely farmers’ fields, a moonscape compared to today. Now, the trees have returned, and with them, some woodland creatures that haven’t been seen since before the colonists flattened the forests primeval.

A case in point is the fisher. This 10- to 15-pound marten has long been found in northern New England and forested regions across North America. But until a few years ago, these weasel-like mammals were unknown here. Now that the trees are back, so are the fishers.

Sometimes called fisher cats, fishers neither fish nor are they even closely related to cats. In fact, they may be a cat’s worst enemy. Fishers usually feed on wild mammals ranging from mice and voles to porcupines and young deer. In suburbia, however, domestic cats are becoming a fisher delicacy. And there’s little a hapless cat can do – run up a tree and the arboreal fisher will follow right behind.

It’s another good reason why all pet cats should be house cats.

The embattled beaver

Pity the poor beaver. Although touted in countless film documentaries, the beaver’s industriousness is always getting the rodent into trouble.
To establish ponded homesteads, beavers kill trees to build dams. The dams often flood roads, lawns, septic systems, parking lots, basements, and other trappings of suburbia, angering the human neighbors.
It wasn’t always so. Driven from much of the East Coast by farmers who chopped down most of the trees, beavers had vanished in many areas by the 19^th Century. With the return of woodlands in the 20^th Century, various reintroduction efforts were successful – so successful in Connecticut that some 8,000 beaver live in that small state today.
Adult beavers have no natural enemies – except man. They are among the few creatures legally hunted with what are called “kill traps.” Amazingly, kill traps are the only legal way to catch them in Connecticut; it is illegal to live trap a beaver to relocate it. The official state explanation: There are so many beavers in Connecticut that moving them would only exacerbate problems elsewhere.
Being industrious and a movie star doesn’t always pay.

Hitchhiking hummers

Nature inspires much lore. Dragonflies sew up your mouth. Toads give you warts. Bats land in your hair.

But a magazine, not children or backwoods naturalists, dreamed up a tale about hummingbirds, those hovering micro-birds that just now getting ready to return to Central America. In the 1880s, a writer proposed that Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, which weigh only an eighth of an ounce, couldn't possibly fly non-stop across the Caribbean on their way to and from North America. Without any evidence in hand, he theorized they hitchhiked on the backs of such larger birds as Canada Geese.

Today, we know this is not true, yet the speculation has been told and retold till many consider it fact. But as is often the case in nature, fact is more amazing than fiction. Rather than hitchhike, this miniature creature, wings whizzing at 80 beats per second, zips non-stop across 1,000 miles of open sea at up to 40 miles per hour, twice a year.

Even more amazing is its metabolism. If you weighed 170 pounds and lived like a hummingbird, you'd burn 150,000 calories a day and produce 100 pounds of sweat. And if you ran out of water, your skin temperature would surpass the melting point of lead and you'd probably catch fire.

Two twitchers

It’s the season of the twitchers, the fledgling birds that seem to get so excited at the prospect of food that their bodies shimmy and shake with excitement.

Most of our songbirds are altricial – like humans, they are born helpless and need to be waited on, break and foot, by their parents. To be fed, the youngest simply hold open mouths so wide, they seem to dwarf their bodies. As they grow older, they add voices to their food demands. And by the time they leave the nest, they twitch for attention – standing on a branch, wildly wiggling their bodies and their slightly open wings as a parent approaches with dinner.

This behavior may have inspired the British word, twitcher, which means a fanatic bird-watcher: It is said that true twitchers go into uncontrollable spasms of excitement at the sighting of a new species. So the next time you see a young sparrow or robin twitching for its lunch, think of an otherwise staid Englishman in his tweeds, binoculars raised, posterior all a-wiggle at the joy of spotting a Long-tailed Tit.