Purple Haze

With Adolph White

 by Kathy Butler Springston 08.2020

Adolph White was a naturalist long before he knew what one was. 

“I was basically a loner as a child and spent a lot of time touring through the woods and enjoying the birds, squirrels and other living things,” Adolph says. “Nature was my partner because I was a budding artist.”

He could step out into a wild world that was “like a friend I depended on,” says Adolph, who grew up in the Spring Grove community of Surry County, where his parents, Roosevelt and Ethel White, worked as sharecroppers. 

“Walking in the fields or forest, I’d commit what I saw to memory. I’d take notes, or quickly sketch a scene, then run home and improve on my drawing.” Adolph would ponder the patterns in leaves, snow drifts, clouds and stars. He felt calm hearing cicadas sing in the pines.

And over the course of his life not much has changed.

“Adolph is interested in everything pertaining to nature,” says Barbara Eck of Glen Allen, who has watched birds and explored the outdoors with him nearly weekly for about fifteen years.

Adolph, 77, reflected on his link with the environment in recent phone chats, without a clue that friends he’s made along trails and watersides were about to honor him.

The retired Richmond teacher was given a Friend of Nature Award for his “dedication to and care” of the purple martins at North Richmond’s Joseph Bryan Park, and using his “creativity to teach folks of all ages about these charming birds and so much more.” It cheers his “lifelong love of earth’s wonders” and calls him a “true inspiration.”

This surprise awaited Adolph when he joined the shade-tree social half of Richmond Audubon’s monthly bird walk at Bryan Park in early August. It came with thanks from Audubon, the Falls of the James Group Sierra Club, and Friends of Bryan Park.

“This is a heart-warming situation for me,” Adolph said, raising the framed award high for ten relatives and twenty friends to see. A hawk-print scarf had hidden it.

The sit-together was billed to Adolph as a “happy travels party” for the park’s southbound martins, so he smiled skyward and said, “Bon voyage, purple martins! I will protect you next year... Nothing messes with my birds!”

Guests were amused to see his iPad animation of a martin leaving a house. 

Adolph’s daughter, Demetria Johnson, said, “My dad has always been in tune with living creatures.” A video on her phone shows him fifteen years ago setting up a birdhouse still used by Carolina wrens in her yard in Varina.

“Dad loves nature, and nature loves Dad,” said his son, Adolph, Jr. “We’re so busy in our society we don’t take time to look at God’s beauty.” He’s glad his father “reminds us to do that.”

Both grandsons, Keith Sutherland, 28, of Richmond, and brother, “B.J.”, 21, benefited from their grandfather’s interest in school projects. He built a coop for Keith’s incubating chicks. Adolph said, “B.J. is helping me make rain look real in iPad animations now.”

Adolph was an avid young reader with good grades. He received a full scholarship at Virginia Union University, taught two years in Warsaw, Virginia, and then became a teacher with Richmond Public Schools.   

Adolph taught middle-schoolers French and English, but many say he understands bird language pretty well, especially the lingo of purple martins. 

This spring, a five-year-old girl was fascinated by the martins flying in and out of holes in three elevated “doll houses” Adolph maintains in Bryan Park. She agreed their chatter sounded happy, as parents fed chicks. She ran for her family to “come see the happy birds… the purple birds.”

That story made Adolph laugh. Then he said, “I’m excited about how the martin houses turned out. It makes me so happy.” Twenty-seven colony members were counted this year in Bryan Park.

Adolph called the late Wynn Price, a city parks specialist based at Bryan, priceless in his assistance.

The late Jimmy Fitzgerald of Providence Forge oversaw installation of the first of the trio of multi-room nest houses. Jimmy had plenty of martin gourds and houses of his own to tend and encouraged White to take the park’s martins under his wing.

“Jimmy and I formed a perfect friendship,” said Adolph. They met one summer evening in 2008 in Shockoe Bottom under a sky swirling with purple martins. Jimmy Fitzgerald had said the birds were “staging” -- gathering to fortify on insects before leaving by summer’s end on a five thousand mile flight to Brazil’s Amazon Basin. 

Right away, Jimmy Fitzgerald had invited Adolph to see his 160-martin operation on the Chickahominy River. Adolph began to help him there and research martins like crazy. Soon, Adolph was sharing information with martin spectators who came nightly to the 17th Street Farmers’ Market for six summers to see the birds sculpt huge tornadoes and roller coasters in the summer air.

The phenomenon was like Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds, only these birds didn’t hurt anybody, as thousands swooped just yards overhead to claim branches in a line of leafy Bradford pear trees at dusk.

But their poop on the sidewalk was a problem. Richmond officials wanted to cut down the trees in which the birds were first noticed roosting en masse in 2007. To save the trees, bird lovers in 2008 organized the Gone to the Birds Festival that brought revenue to the city and diners to the Bottom.

When Fitzgerald was alive, he said Adolph was a godsend for the festivals. Adolph helped at the Purple Martin Conservation Association booth, and children flocked to him to hear about the migration.

Adolph was even among early-risers hosing the sidewalks all season after 25,000 or so hungry birds left the trees in the mornings to forage. 

Adolph recalled the crowd’s stir as Richmond’s rare peregrine falcons appeared at dusk. When a falcon caught a martin in air, the martins, already tucked in the trees, switched from a busy chatter to a “warning chorus that sounded like running water.” Red-tailed hawks going into the trees to get carry-out dinner caused a louder rush.

Such exciting nights and festivals ended six year ago when the martins no longer clustered downtown.

Before the gala at Bryan Park earlier this month, only two or three chatty martins remained. Typically, Adolph sees the birds leave this pond site a few at a time until all are gone by the end of July. They then join a big group in the region preparing for the pilgrimage to Brazil. With family raising done, all can be leisurely, flying 300 miles a day. Their final destinations for fall in South America vary. They rush coming north to nab the best mates, nest sites and food. Masses can be seen on weather radar each way. 

Adolph said, “Just think, martins raised at our park this year are making their first trip!”  

Friends of Bryan Park president John Zuegner thanked Adolph for providing park visitors the opportunity to see these special birds raise families up close for eleven years. 

Sue Ridd, the park’s former Nature Center director and a Gone to the Birds organizer, said, “Some people have pets. Adolph has the purple martins.” 

Sue said Adolph has been inventive in protecting the martins. 

For one thing, he made sure the houses don’t feed hawks, especially a grabby local Cooper’s hawk. He attached “wire porches” through which large winged predators cannot reach the house openings.

Sometimes, friends said, Adolph looks like he is dancing to scare away house sparrows, nuisance birds brought to the United States from Europe in the mid-1800s, that will squash martin eggs, kill chicks and build their own nests on top of the carnage.

Adolph rode to the colony with family in July to repair baffles that keep snakes from climbing the poles.

Martins typically return to the park on March 15, if warmth brings ample insects to eat, he said. Martin caretakers must clean the houses and open the doors on time.  

Adolph takes nature photos and has ended birders’ picnics with guitar music and song. 

He once repaired televisions and was an information technology specialist in charge of school computer systems. Birders pick his brain for camera, tablet or cell phone tips.

An educator for 31 years, Adolph still enjoys instructing children. Teaching visiting Holton Elementary School children about Bryan’s martins and having them draw together for several years “was so rewarding,” he said.

At the park’s Nature Center, Adolph gave many programs, using his artistic diagrams, until the center closed in 2018 for repairs. He hopes to show kids how to make nature flip-art books, maybe outdoors.

“With the coronavirus threat keeping youngsters home from school for months, parks like Bryan have been important,” he said. “Bringing kids out in nature makes them less stressful, gives them exercise and a break from television, smart phones and such. It helps their outlook.”

Many families in the park early in the pandemic said it was their first visit, and some were making nature lessons of their strolls, several meeting purple martins for the first time.

“Parks can acquaint and pull all types of people together,” Adolph said. A 285-acre “haven,” Bryan Park is attracting visitors of many ethnicities this year, as “everybody needs to get out of their houses,” he observed. 

“I was lucky to grow up in the country,” he said. “But city kids need to come to parks, where there’s something besides pavement, where they’ll enjoy the shade of the trees, playing on grass and being surprised by animals.” 

Children frequenting parks “can see the world from an artistic point of view.” They just might be inspired to “pursue careers in science and help the environment”, Adolph White noted.

“When I was younger I thought the earth would exist as it was; I never thought of forests being destroyed... or about pollution.”

Art and science are connected for Adolph. He teaches children to draw not just a tree, but the shadow it casts. “That’s a value the tree offers us.”

He wants children to learn the language of Mother Nature.