Page 119 - Early Naturalists of the Black Range

William Henry Bergtold
Bergtold surveyed the headwaters of the Gila every year from 1905 to at least 1912. He published his findings in “October Birds of the Headwaters of the Gila River, New Mexico”, The Auk, Volume 29, Number 3, July 1912, pp. 327-336. At page 330, he noted that “. . . difficulty of identification is increased by the inherent peculiarities of the local bird fauna: many bird races overlap here and at times it is absolutely impossible to place a given bird in its subspecific niche without shooting it”. He lists records for 76 species.
In The Auk, Volume 29, No. 2 (April 1912), p. 237, Bergtold reported on collection of a Snowy Egret at “the junction of the East Fork of the Gila River, and Diamond Creek”. A few years prior, he had reported one in the same general location (The Auk, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 76) and one about 60 miles away in 1907.

James H. Gaut
Gaut’s field notes from 24 July 1901 to January 1906 (numbers 1 to 1108) include time spent in New Mexico. The record includes the number, sex, genera/latin binomial, locality, and date for each species he encountered. The notes are available at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. His focus was fauna, not flora.
Clarence A. Truholtz
Truholtz was an Army surgeon who collected birds while at Ft. Bayard. John Hubbard reports that he has “located 28 specimens of bird eggs and skins collected at Fort Bayard between 26 May 1904 and 23 January 1913, all presumably by Truholtz.” On May 31, 1907, he was at Ft. Bayard when he was summoned to Pinos Altos in a vain attempt to save a young woman from a morphine overdose (Albuquerque
Evening Citizen) . Clarence Birdseye
Birdseye was collecting Fringed Bat, Myotis thysanodes, on the west base of the Mimbres Mountains in August 1908. He was in New Mexico between 1907 and 1909. In 1908- 1909, he was employed by the Biological Survey as an Assistant Naturalist. (He went on to establish the frozen food industry. Yes, that Birdseye.)
On September 6/7, 1908, Birdseye and Vernon Bailey collected three specimens of Myotis baileyi, at “Luna, Gila National Forest, New Mexico”. The species was first described by N. Hollister in 1909. The type specimen was collected near Ruidoso, by Hollister, in 1902. In 1928, Miller and Allen “determined” that M.
Clarence Birdseye, 1910
baileyi was a synonym for M. occultus, the other new species described by Hollister in his 1909 paper (see M. baileyi link, above). In 1967, M. occultus was subsumed within M. lucifugus as M. l. occultus, in a paper by James Findley and Clyde Jones (“Taxonomic Relationships of Bats of the Species Myotis fortidens, M. lucifugus, and M. occultus”, Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 429-444.
Myotis lucifugus, Little Brown Bat, has a large range. It is found in much of North America but is apparently limited to high elevation forests in Mexico. The individual shown below was photographed in Railroad Canyon, Black Range, New Mexico.
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