LeConte and it was a trek that was life changing he went onto climb the mountain more than 500 times during his lifetime. During the eight of the ten years it has been my rare privilege to be on the check list days.” Enjoying the company of such seasoned experts would serve Adams well during his time in the Great Smoky Mountains.īack in 1918, Paul Adams had made his first memorable trip up Mt. Nearly all the birds found in the vicinity of Knoxville are to be found on the Reservation. Harry Fortner, now of the University of Vermont, started the census taking idea in 1922. Ijams of Knoxville has been on all expeditions, as he and Mr. In his later years, Paul Adams reflected, “Mr. At its inception, the East Tennessee Bird Reservation, as it was formerly known, was a monumental achievement and recognized as one of the largest protected bird reserves in the state at that time.

In 1931, Adams summarized the first decade of bird counts at what the Knoxville News Sentinel dubbed The City of Birds, a 1,000-acre sanctuary either side of the Tennessee River known for its abundant avian residents. The fledgling club rallied around the sightings of a nesting pair of barn owls on Dickenson Island (now Island Home Airport) downstream from Knoxville. This was impressive stuff for a youngster who had spent part of his childhood bedridden.Īs young man Paul Adams co-founded the East Tennessee Ornithological Society in late 1923 along with seasoned naturalists including Harry Ijams, Arthur Ogden, Brockway Crouch and others – a growing band of passionate bird watchers who had formed a break-away group from the East Tennessee Audubon Society to focus on bird study. Family camping trips to the Great Smoky Mountains fueled his fascination with wildlife and he began assembling an impressive collection of native butterflies and moths as well as what would one of the largest collections of mollusks then in existence. Inspired by his father’s weekend family nature walks, Paul began writing nature journals when he was six years old and which he continued during his entire life.

Adams was raised in Illinois before moving to North Carolina at a young age. Paul Adams and Cumberland Jack at the Mountain View Hotel, Gatlinburg, 1926.īorn in 1901, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Paul J.

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