George Campbell Munro

OBITUARY from April 30, 1964 issue of Notes and News of the University of New Mexico:

"GEORGE CAMPBELL MUNRO, a member of the A.O.U. since 1939 and an Elective Member since 1945, died at his home in Honolulu on December 4, 1963, at the advanced age of 97. I visited him in June, 1962, and found the old gentleman, if not as hale as when we first became friends during the war, at least with the same hearty laugh. When I left he walked me to the corner, chugging along with a cane in each hand.

Born in New Zealand on May 10, 1866, Munro came to Hawaii in 1890 as assistant to H. C. Palmer, a bird collector for Lord Walter Rothschild. They collected throughout the islands and discovered several new species, some of them alas now extinct. Rothschild in his imposing and oddly titled Avifauna of Laysan and the surrounding islands, named three or more species and a spectacular new genus after Palmer, but never, I believe, mentioned Munro. Probably Palmer had carefully suppressed his able young assistant.

Later Palmer returned to Australia, only to be obscurely murdered in the gold fields of that continent. But Munro remained in the islands for the rest of his long life. For years with his family and some Polynesian ranch hands he operated the entire island of Lanai--141 square miles--as a single vast cattle spread. Before his death he had become a patriarch with 20 great grandchildren.

It was not until 1944 that Munro published his Birds o! Hawaii (of which a new and slightly revised edition appeared in 1960). Although poorly illustrated, it contains authentic short accounts of most of the extinct Hawaiian species by one of the very few naturalists ever to view them alive. Munro pioneered in the banding of seafowl.

He also had a lifelong interest in Coleoptera and in botany. In later years he devoted much effort to saving some of the very local endemic Hawaiian plants. In 1958 the Governor of Hawaii established a special arboretum to aid these efforts.

Harterr might have been writing of Munro when, many years ago, he described another of Rothschild's collectors, Alfred Everett, as one of the gentlest of gentlemen. Hawaii will not be the same without George Munro. -- D. AMADON"