The Birdman

Singing for Aires lifts MARIO COHN-HAFT '83 to new flights.

On a 1992 alumni survey Cohn-Haft described his job: "Study Amazonian birds in Brazil: work long hours, no pay, tremendous satisfaction." Cohn-Haft still pursues his passion in the forests, savannahs and grasslands of Amazona (the third largest state in Brazil) but now it's as a staff scientist with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia (INPA) in Manaus. This Ph.D. ornithologist, who has led Bill Gates and Peter Gabriel on Amazon birdwatching tours, serves as curator of INPA's bird collection and studies the biogeography and bioacoustics of Amazonian birds.

"One of the really interesting results of working down here is that these so-called cryptic speciesbirds that look the same and have always been considered one species—are often more easily recognizable by vocal differences than by physical, plumage or morphological differences," says Cohn-Haft, who credits his Aires singing background with helping him to distinguish between these nearly identical species prior to obtaining DNA confirmation. "The Amazon is the only place in the world where the birds are different on opposite sides of the big rivers."

Cohn-Haft, who is married to Brazilian plant ecologist Rita Mesquita, celebrated his 20th year in Brazil last April, he says, "out in the field under a full moon." He spends nearly half the year doing research throughout Amazona, a state slightly larger than Alaska and which has twice as many bird species.

"Like most biologists who spend a lot of time in the field I've got a huge backlog of fascinating data and unnamed bird species to be described, including a new blue jay," says Cohn-Haft, who researched and wrote the DOC's guide to birds of the Second College Grant as an undergrad. "But I'm not about to stop going to the field; it's part of the stimulus. Just sitting at a desk and putting together the data is not good enough. You get stale if you don't go out and see the birds."