Bob Davidson shared what he loved. The long time Invertebrate Zoology Collection Manager at Carnegie Museum of Natural History died in his sleep on November 6, at the age of 77, five years after his formal retirement. For all those who knew him, news of his passing triggered a mental review of the subjects he shared with us through conversation, rant, written account, and mutual experience. In day-to-day life, Bob valued family, friends, classical music, theatre, literature, films, comedy, fine food, junk food, travel, the entire state of Vermont, a variety of fermented beverages, and, owing to his own service in Nepal, all fellow Peace Corps alumni.
As a scientist, and more specifically as an entomologist, Bob valued colleagues, well-curated museum collections, field work, written accounts of early field naturalists, anatomical information only accessible through high powered microscopes, functional headlamps, and the enormous family of ground dwelling beetles known collectively as carabids.
Some forty years ago, during a summer evening in the mountains of North Carolina, Bob demonstrated the connection between those last two categories. Along with Amy Henrici, then a Fossil Preparator for the Museum’s Section of Vertebrate Paleontology, and later section’s Collection Manager, I had accepted Bob’s invitation to assist him with beetle collecting in the Nantahala National Forest. The experience revealed how Bob’s passion for the tiny creatures he studied overrode consideration for decent meals. His dinner before our headlamp illuminated collecting foray in a forest understory of rhododendron consisted of two hamburgers, purchased many hours earlier in a lower elevation town, and re-heated on the dashboard of his aged Datsun by the windshield magnified rays of the setting sun.
In the dark woods Bob shared information beyond the need-to-know basics of how to distinguish our quarry, carabid beetles of the genus Scaphinotus, from any other nocturnal invertebrates we might encounter. Theoretically, according to his informal briefing, on any tree trunk we passed, the beam of our headlamps might reveal an example of the ongoing predator/prey interactions that have long shaped life on our planet. The dark, inch-long beetles we hoped to collect were snail eaters who frequently tracked their prey in trees by circling trunks to detect, and then resolutely follow, slime trails.
In the decades since, at science-promoting public events such as bioblitz surveys at city parks or behind-the-scenes programs at the Museum, I’ve often seen Bob take the same approach with people he’d just met, presenting the lives of overlooked creatures as endlessly interesting. In September 2019, Bob wrote an entertaining account about snail-eating beetles for the Museum’s blog. In re-reading this brief essay I can hear his voice and conjure the sounds and scents of a dark Appalachian mountain forest.
During Bob’s 40-year career at the Museum much of his fieldwork was conducted in locations far more exotic than North Carolina. For weeks, and on a few occasions months at a time, Bob was part of museum field crews in Cameroon, Ecuador, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Tiawan. In considering the commonality among such far-flung collecting locations, Bob had a ready answer. “Most of the sites were chosen for salvage collecting: places out of the way, not collected much by other institutions, often difficult to access, and already on the chopping block for habitat destruction.” These out-of-country collecting efforts added hundreds of thousands of specimens to the Museum’s invertebrate zoology collection, each an authentic information unit to inform future conservation decisions, as well as ecology, genetics, and population studies.
After his retirement Bob continued to make scientific contributions by identifying carabid beetles for the National Ecological Observatory Network, a National Science Foundation funded project. Another particularly noteworthy retirement contribution involved Bob’s writing skills. Following the death in 2021 of Dr. John E. Rawlins, Curator Emeritus of the Museum’s Section of Invertebrate Zoology, Bob collaborated with Assistant Curator James Fetzner to create an Annals of Carnegie Museum volume honoring the 33-year museum career of the scientist many people knew simply as Moth Man.
John was leader for many of the Museum’s insect collecting expeditions to foreign lands, and in recounting some of the harrowing experiences of those adventures, Bob shares his thoughts, excitement, amusement, and sometimes pure terror. Through this memorial publication, adventure stories first shared in Pittsburgh around pitchers of beer in Oakland barrooms are now accessible to curious digitally savvy readers via a few keyboard clicks. In recounting a long 1984 expedition to Cameroon, Bob describes how, in John’s company he frequently found himself in situations where it wasn’t clear how to react, closing this observation with a particularly powerful example. “Or arriving in Paris on our way home, and finding that while we were ensconced on the southwest face of the volcano that June, a deadly gas cloud escaped on the northeast face and flowed down over one of the villages, killing everyone.”
For Bob’s friends and colleagues his passing has left us without a clear reaction pattern. In this situation, reading some of what he wrote to honor a friend and colleague is a positive step.
Pat McShea is Educator Emeritus at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.