“I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently.” (Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees)

No one I have ever met was more attuned to bird sounds, or to birds in general, than was Ted Parker. It was from Ted that many of us, who thought that we already knew a thing or two about birds, truly learned how to sense the world.

No matter when one first met, or heard of, Ted Parker, the name was already a legend. I first met Ted over 20 years ago, and like many people at the time I was already somewhat in awe of him. Then he was known for his birding exploits in the United States and in Mexico. Although I did not realize it at the time, he was already studying the birds of South America, and soon would be transforming our understanding of the avifauna of that continent. By the end of the 1970s, within just a few years of his first trip to the Andes, and without benefit of field guides or commerical bird tapes, he was already the field ornithologist of South America.