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.et Coues made the most of 

 his stint at Fort Macon. Bogue Banks, 

 he had to admit, was "a good place for 

 field natural history." He did exhaustive 

 studies of shorebirds, marsh birds and 

 seabirds, but hardly confined his 

 curiosity to winged creatures. Before he 

 left in November 1 870, Coues had 

 conducted the most thorough survey of 

 animal life on the southern coast, most 

 of it published in a five-part 

 series in the Proceedings of 

 the Academy of Natural 

 Sciences of Philadelphia. 



Born Sept. 9, 1842, in 

 Portsmouth, N.H., Coues was 

 a protege of Spencer Baird, 

 the Smithsonian Institution's 

 founder. He had hoped to join 

 his mentor in Washington, 

 D.C., after fieldwork in 

 Arizona and South Carolina. 

 But, like many 19th-century 

 naturalists who were not 

 independently wealthy, he 

 found an Army medical career 

 his only real chance to see the 

 world and make a name for 

 himself. He earned his medical 

 degree at Columbia University 

 in 1863 and stayed in the 

 Army for 17 years. 



Coues was a prolific writer. While 

 in the Army, he published 300 articles 

 and papers, and he later wrote several 

 landmark texts of natural history. While 

 his far-ranging curiosity led him down 

 some rather eclectic paths — his 

 thousand-page Monographs of North 

 American Rodentia, co-written with Joel 

 Asaph Allen in 1877, comes to mind — 

 Coues gained the greatest acclaim for 

 his Handbook of Field and General 

 Ornithology (1890) and Key to North 

 American Birds (1903), two classics 

 renowned for their accuracy and Coues' 

 beautifully hand-drawn illustrations. 



When Coues and his wife moved to 

 North Carolina in 1869, 125 enlisted 

 men lived within Fort Macon. Married 

 soldiers resided in six wooden barracks 



nearby. Coues wrote in an 1 870 report 

 for the surgeon general's office that the 

 fort was overcrowded, moldy, lacking 

 proper sanitary facilities and exposed to 

 "shifting winds" that "wafted malaria 

 from the swamps of the mainland." He 

 called his own living quarters "most 

 wretched" and said they "are all going to 

 pieces; they all leak, and afford but little 

 protection from the weather." 



Life was spare at Fort Macon, as illustrated in 1862 

 by a Union soldier, James Wells Champney. 



Courtesy ofN.C. Division of Archives and History 



Fort Macon could not have been 

 too unhealthy, for there certainly 

 weren't enough sick soldiers to make 

 Coues linger at its hospital. In fact, he 

 commandeered his hospital steward, 

 A.C. Beals, and the two spent endless 

 hours rambling across Bogue Banks. 

 Coues recorded every living thing he 

 saw, from alligators to mud snails, sea 

 urchins to gray foxes. And, armed with 

 a shovel, a seine and a shotgun, he 

 collected thousands of specimens of 

 birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, insects 

 and marine invertebrates. 



On arriving at Fort Macon, Coues 

 wrote Baird and asked him to send mus- 

 tard seed shot, powder and caps for 

 shooting birds and arsenic for preserving 

 them. "If so," Coues wrote, "I will give 

 S.I. (Smithsonian Institution) pretty 



HISTORIAN 



COAST 



much everything I collect," which he 

 did. (A shotgun, not binoculars, was the 

 essential tool for a 19th-century orni- 

 thologist, and Coues typically shot 50 to 

 100 of each species unless it was rare.) 

 The Annual Report of the Smithsonian 

 Institution in 1 869 indicates that Coues 

 donated "two boxes bird skins and os- 

 teological collections." He sent other 

 Bogue Banks specimens across the 

 United States, including 

 crustaceans to the Chicago 

 Academy of Sciences and 

 even insects to the Boston 

 Society of Natural History. 



Coues was not the first 

 naturalist to attract national 

 attention to the Fort Macon/ 

 Beaufort vicinity. To my 

 knowledge, that honor falls 

 to William Stimpson, a 

 Smithsonian naturalist who 

 published his "Trip to Beau- 

 fort, N.C." in the American 

 Journal of Sciences and Arts 

 in 1860. (Stimpson later lost 

 his natural history collec- 

 tions in the great Chicago 

 fire of 1871.) 



But Coues, much more 

 so than Stimpson, drew the 

 scientific community to Fort Macon. His 

 articles, the collections that he shared so 

 widely and his habit of inviting his 

 colleagues to visit him at Fort Macon 

 put the Beaufort area on the map of 

 naturalists across the United States. 

 Other naturalists followed Coues to 

 Carteret County in the 1870s. News of 

 the region's potential for marine 

 research spread until Johns Hopkins 

 University established a summer 

 laboratory in Beaufort in 1880, the first 

 of several marine research centers 

 located there. 



Coues wrote extensively at Fort 

 Macon. He described the nesting habits 

 of least terns and Wilson's plovers in 

 The American Naturalist, the anatomy 

 of bird wings for a journal published by 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 25 



