Iran RPCV Dave Ferguson oversees $1 million in funding for the ever-expanding Multinational Species Conservation Acts, programs established since the early 1990s to help elephants, rhinos, tigers, apes and marine turtles, among others. More acts are in the works to cover cranes, small cats and "keystone species"
A legacy of conservation
Rochester native leaves his mark on wildlife worldwide
By Gary Fallesen
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Rochester, N.Y.
May 8, 2005
Dave Ferguson never let not knowing slow him down.
Not when he graduated from Charlotte High School in 1957 and went to Cornell University to study wildlife conservation despite having no direction but his love for the outdoors to spur him on.
Not when he returned from military service in Korea, still unclear about a career, and joined the Peace Corps in 1966. Asked for his first three choices of where he would like to serve, he wrote:
1. Far East;
2. Africa;
3. Any place else.
"They offered me any place else," recalls Ferguson, 65, the branch chief for the Near East, South Asia and Africa in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Division of International Conservation.
Any place turned out to be Iran.
"I didn't know anything about Iran other than it was in the Middle East," says Ferguson, who will be the featured speaker at the International Migratory Bird Day Festival on Saturday at Braddock Bay Park in Greece.
Ferguson was assigned to the agricultural extension program in Iran. Agriculture was nearly as foreign to him as Iran.
"When I got to Iran, they told me, 'We forgot to tell you there's a fish and game department. Would you be interested in that?'" Ferguson recalls.
How do you say, "You bet I would" in Iranian?
"That was a big fork in the road that I went down," Ferguson says. "The experience with that department changed my life. It gave me an interest and charged me up with what I wanted to do for my life."
It was on the job training with a capital ON THE JOB.
A 26-year-old Ferguson, working in the wildlife field for the first time, started a division of research and development in Iran's fledgling fish and game department.
"I kind of knew it was the best job I'd ever have from the standpoint of variety and challenges," he says. "It was a good match. They were a young organization and I was a young person and we learned together."
Ferguson wasn't afraid to ask questions and to ask people for help. He learned about local wildlife from local people. He met and befriended Lindon Cornwallis, a British ornithologist who was collecting information on wetlands and waterfowl in Iran.
"That's the best way to learn, when you're with someone who really knows his stuff," says Ferguson, who remains friends with Cornwallis nearly 40 years later.
That's a lesson he may have unknowingly passed along to others, who have learned from him.
When Ferguson first encountered Cornwallis, the Rochester native had no way of knowing where it would lead. Many years later, Ferguson was playing a critical role in the conservation of the Siberian crane, one of the rarest birds in the world, which winters in India, as well as the great Indian bustard and several species of vultures.
Nowadays, his department also oversees $1 million in funding for the ever-expanding Multinational Species Conservation Acts, programs established since the early 1990s to help elephants, rhinos, tigers, apes and marine turtles, among others. More acts are in the works to cover cranes, small cats and "keystone species" (species important to the welfare of any system), according to Ferguson.
"His efforts in India over the years have contributed directly to the conservation of many rare and endangered species," says Ed McCrea of the Bird Coalition of Rochester, which is hosting the third annual International Migratory Bird Day Festival.
"Perhaps more important to wildlife conservation in the long run are his efforts to support local conservationists and wildlife biologists in order to increase basic management and research capabilities in many countries."
That may be Ferguson's legacy when he retires in September from the job he took 30 years ago.
"When you're younger you aspire to be a hero all the time. You want recognition," Ferguson says from his office in the Washington, D.C. area, where he lives with his wife Judy. (Their two grown children live in Columbus, Ohio, and the Fergusons have two grandchildren.) "If you're modest, you want someone else to recognize you rather than toot your own horn."
Humbly, Ferguson would like to think he has been a hero of sorts in some out-of-the-way places - parts of the world in which conservation might have been ignored had he not come along.
While Ferguson admits he didn't know much when he started out in the field, he did know he wasn't interested in being a wildlife biologist in the United States. "One of the things that attracted me about international stuff is there weren't too many people out there doing anything," he says.
In fact, he says, of the nearly 8,000 employees of U.S. Fish & Wildlife, only 20 are attached to the international division. "It (international conservation) doesn't have a high profile even within the agency," Ferguson says.
Yet the world has grown perceptively smaller.
The message in Ferguson's presentation "Birds and Conservation on the Other Side of the World" on Saturday will be this: There are similarities in conservation problems and issues no matter where you're living.
"While it seems weird that we might be interested in something in India," Ferguson explains, "there's a lot we need to work together on. We affect each other. It's always been that way, but there's more and more of a realization of it now.
"If we're thinking outside of our little box - whether it's the United States, Rochester, N.Y., or Durand-Eastman Park - we can share what we know and empower others to do things for themselves."
McCrea, and by extension the Bird Coalition of Rochester, can be counted among those who have been influenced by Ferguson.
"Dave took me under his wing when I started working internationally," says McCrea, who lives in Ontario, Wayne County. "He is a quiet, unassuming person, but he is universally liked and respected by his colleagues."
For some time, Ferguson wrestled with what to do with all that he had learned on the job. He wanted to pass it on to the next generation of conservationists. Only recently he came to the realization that he's been doing that all these years.
From Iran to Bombay to Braddock Bay, he has helped make a world of difference in wildlife conservation.
