EP 468. When Conservation Came to Mississippi

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, take II. Today’s guest she and I have been on a venture this morning. And for me it’s been like falling off down memory lane. We started off on a lake down in Copiah County overlooking this lake that I grew up fishing on when I was a teenager with some local friends and neighbors. And, well, that didn’t work out. There was a whole bunch of bus loads full of kids yammering away and the wind was blowing. So we’re on part II. And just getting here to take II took me down my old stomping grounds, Cathy. I haven’t been down some of these roads in a long time.

Cathy Shropshire: And it’s changed, I’m sure.

Ramsey Russell: Today’s guest is Ms. Cathy Shropshire, who I really go back a long ways with, in fact, to the halls my freshman year at Mississippi State University, which was a long time ago now, Cathy. But I’m going to start this question off, this interview off like this. What took a biology major from Ole Miss, I ain’t going to hold that against you, to the halls, Dorman hall, Mississippi State University and the College of Forestry, Natural Wildlife Resources. How did that end up?

Cathy Shropshire: Well, it took a rather circuitous route. I was at Ole Miss, and while I was there, I got interested in anthropology and took some classes there and worked in the museum there. And I really enjoyed the museum setting. And of course it was anthropology things, but I enjoyed that setting. And I thought, you know, this sounds like something I might like to do, is work in a natural science museum. Who knew that there were jobs there and that people would hire you to do those kinds of things? And so I applied to Texas Tech University. So that was a culture shock.

Ramsey Russell: That must be a cultural shock.

Cathy Shropshire: They don’t two step at Ole Miss then. Did a lot of two step in at Texas Tech. So I was there in their museum science program, and so when I graduated there, there was a job opening at the museum in natural science there in Jackson and I applied for it. And I think it didn’t hurt that I had been in Mississippi before my – I didn’t grow up in Mississippi, my parents did, and I grew up in East Texas. But I think it didn’t hurt that I had been in Mississippi before and knew the culture. And so I was at the Natural Science Museum and was the curator of mammal collection. And I guess about 12 years after that, having met Harry Jacobson. I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: I know Harry Jacobson.

Cathy Shropshire: I’m sure you do. And a lot of your listeners probably know Harry. Harry got money to do a black bear project. And because of being the curator of the mammal collection, I had taking in the roadkill bears or the illegally shot bears for the collection at the Natural Science Museum. So he knew of my interest and I had as much background in black bears as anybody else in Mississippi at the time. So he offered the position to work on my PhD in black bears. And because I just do things like this, I said, Tommy, can we do this? And he said, sure, if you want to try it. I went off to Mississippi State when I turned 40 in Mississippi State. I was with my children there.

Ramsey Russell: Back when Doctor Jacobson would have started that black bear research in the state of Mississippi. Black bears were practically non-existent in the state of Mississippi.

Cathy Shropshire: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, they were endangered, the Louisiana black bear, very few of them. And really the only ones you ever heard about in the state of Mississippi were hit on highway 61 or somewhere in the delta.

Cathy Shropshire: Right. And the first one I ever had was in, I started working October of 1977. And in thanksgiving of 1977, when I get back from thanksgiving vacation, there is a bear in the sink at the museum. It had been illegally killed in the delta. And that was my first introduction and that’s what got me interested. Well, where are they and how many are they? And what’s going on with them? And like you say, what we were getting mostly were bears that were being killed on the road. And those were usually 99% of the time it would be a 2 year old male, when the dispersing males.

Ramsey Russell: Look at how the delta itself has changed since those days that you took that position with Harry Jacobson. There are now 350,000, 400,000 more acres of hardwood habitat pursuant to CRP, WRP and some of these restoration projects that were focused in that area, in part to restore the black bear. And I can remember long after we stalked the halls of Mississippi State University, this would have been in the 2000s, so we’re talking a long time, 20, 30 years later, I can remember on a rainy day walking to a close deer stand in northern Warren County, Mississippi, and right there I stopped dead in my tracks. And it was the first time I ever laid eyes on a bear track in the state of Mississippi. And since then they have boomed.

Cathy Shropshire: Right. Well, the first breeding bears that were born in Mississippi that we know of were born on WRP land.

Ramsey Russell: How many bears would you have guessed? Or what did you learn doing your PhD under Jacobson? How many bears might there have been in the state of Mississippi at the time? Dozen’s maybe?

Cathy Shropshire: Maybe. But we always said less than 50, but I think it was very much less than 50. I think mostly what we were getting with those.

Ramsey Russell: And I wonder how many there are now, 100s. It’s got to be 100s.

Cathy Shropshire: It wouldn’t doubt it. I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve just been away from it so long that I really don’t know right now.

Ramsey Russell: It’s an amazing animal. We’ve got such a profound history with black bears in the Mississippi delta. I can remember working for Fish & Wildlife Service, Cathy, might as well keep chasing this rabbit down the trail because I love it. But I can remember Bo Sloan.

Cathy Shropshire: Yes. Bo and I spent many hours together.

Ramsey Russell: Bo Sloan, recovering a black bear, a female, and 2 cubs that had been hit near Dahomey National Wildlife Refuge, not killed and radio collar them and everything else, and it’s so amazing. We’re talking within a dozen miles of the Mississippi river on the west side of the state of Mississippi. And that female bear was actually hit again and killed on highway 45 almost on the Alabama line. That’s crazy how big their range was.

Cathy Shropshire: And they cross that Mississippi river, they can cross it straight across.

Ramsey Russell: Swim it like nothing.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. We knew they did it. We knew they could cross the river, but we didn’t know, did they start in Memphis and end up in New Orleans? We weren’t sure how much that. But we’ve got records of bears that were, say, on the Louisiana side and almost directly across the river onto the Mississippi side.

Ramsey Russell: So what was the emphasis of your research?

Cathy Shropshire: Mine was basically the history and the status. Just trying to get the ground level work to decide, where are the bears? And do people want bears? Will they tolerate bears? I mean, we don’t want to bring in, but do we want to develop a program to enhance the black bear population, if the public’s not going to be receptive?

Ramsey Russell: One more bear story, unless I think of another. But we got into this camp in Warren County many, many years ago, WRP, newly hardwood planted, I later saw the bear track there, but before then, I get a call one day, I’m up in Arkansas, it’s middle of summertime from a friend of mine, Mr. T.J Pennock, another member, and his tongue sounded real thick, like if you drank a lot of beer on a Saturday afternoon riding around through the woods, it might. And we had some hog traps out. And in one of those traps, he went to go check was a big bear. And he said, what do I do? I said, how many bears have you had? And it was too many to be opening. And he ended up calling somebody, I can’t remember whose number I gave him, somebody over, probably Ray Aycock over at Fish and Wildlife Service. And to hear him describe it, 50 people showed up. NDWFP and Save the Bear Foundation, probably you. Everybody in the world showed up. And it was almost like that convoy song, 11 Long Haired Friends of Jesus, he said, everybody showed up and they collared that bear. And do you know, Cathy, that bear died 10 or 15 years later, way over on Lake George, 30 air miles from there. And at the time was the oldest bear in the state of Mississippi. That’s crazy.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. Well, just to play off of your Warren County, the first tracks I ever saw in Mississippi were on Hooker’s Ridge in Warren County, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. It’s close to Buck and Wing. Anyway, it’s Anderson Tully property at the time, and that was the first plaque, but that was the last stronghold that Fannye Cook  knew for black bears in Mississippi. So that would have been back in the 30s.

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to get into Ms. Fannye Cook . Cause that’s how this conversation originated. At the time you were working on the black bears with Doctor Jacobson, you were also still the curator of the museum?

Cathy Shropshire: Well, no, at that time I had moved to the game division. At that time I was ten years at the museum, and then I moved to the game division and started working on their hunter harvest surveys that we used to do in house. And then this black bear thing came up. So when I finally finished my PhD, we started doing some black bear stuff out of the game division because by that time hunters and fishermen were paying for black bear research through their dollars. And it’s considered an endangered species, but given enough, you can hunt them.

Ramsey Russell: I think it’s been delisted now. I think the Louisiana black bear has been delisted.

Cathy Shropshire: In Louisiana, but I think it’s still protected in Mississippi. I think in Louisiana.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s got to be the same bears up in Arkansas, at least down in southern Arkansas.

Cathy Shropshire: Southern Arkansas, it’s considered the same subspecies.

Ramsey Russell: And spilling over this way.

Cathy Shropshire: Oh, yeah, they came across, they always did. When they reintroduced them in bears back in the 60s, I guess, in Louisiana, Arkansas, those bears, a lot of them ended up in Mississippi trying to get home.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of coming across Mississippi river, you mentioned earlier you’re from Texas, that’s how all those Texas Armadillos got across. I’ve heard my whole life that when an armadillo comes across Mississippi river, they just walk across the bottom. Is there any truth to that?

Cathy Shropshire: They can. They can also get on cars. I wrote an article one time and said, well, it’s also been said that during the civil war, they used them as cannons and shot them across the river. So, there’s all kinds of theories out there. Pick one.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never heard that one. They got shot across the Mississippi river, probably by the folks from up north, shooting them in the Mississippi. Talk about growing up in Texas, as a young lady, what was your interest, specifically, in the outdoors and nature? Did you grow up in a hunting family? Did you hunt?

Cathy Shropshire: I did not hunt. I grew up on a reservoir, Corps of Engineers reservoir like Sardis. My dad was a resident engineer, so we grew up out on the lake, the reservoir. And so my dad was a very big fisherman, so we fished all the time. But you got to remember this was, I was born in 1953, so deer hunting wasn’t that big because there still weren’t a whole lot of deer around. And he took my brother, my brother squirrel hunted. We went duck hunting. We did have a blind in the boat. Yeah, back in the olden days, we had a blind that we put it –

Ramsey Russell: So you’re just kind of the little sister that tagged along?

Cathy Shropshire: I was exactly the little sister that tagged along and thought – Yeah, when I got my BB gun when I was 6, so I could be like my brother. He got a pellet gun, so he was always outdoing me.

Ramsey Russell: Do you attribute those going out and tagging along? Is that where you develop a lifelong affinity for the natural world like that?

Cathy Shropshire: I think it is. Because we were very isolated, actually. My closest neighbors were 3 miles, so we spent a lot of time outside. And my mother, she fed me Audubon magazine. She fed me, information about nature and that sort of thing. So she knew I had an interest. And I had my rock collection, I had all those things that kids do when they grow up out in the country.

Ramsey Russell: What did you think you wanted to do when you went to Ole Miss to be a biology student?

Cathy Shropshire: I wanted to get as far away from home as I could. That was some of it. Because this is real funny, as you talk about how do you end up and you seem to end up where you’re supposed to be. But also applied, when I applied for Ole Miss, I also applied to Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches in his very strong wildlife department.

Ramsey Russell: Still does.

Cathy Shropshire: And I chose not to go there. But yet I ended up in a wildlife department. And then going around the world, I still ended up in a wildlife department. So would I have gotten there sooner had I done that? I don’t know. Maybe.

Meeting with Billy Johnson at the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum.

And about this time last year, I was meeting up with Billy Johnson at the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum. And we’ve had some great conversations over the years. He’s an epic storyteller and basically just a lifelong hunter from the Mississippi Delta.

Ramsey Russell: That’s all very interesting. And about this time last year, I was meeting up with Billy Johnson at the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum. And we’ve had some great conversations over the years. He’s an epic storyteller and basically just a lifelong hunter from the Mississippi Delta. But his interest as he’s gotten older led him to build this museum and several others right there. And of all places, Leland, Mississippi, small town, Mississippi Delta town, little sleepy little hamlet, I would describe it. And the last conversation last year, he got to talking about the Mississippi Outdoor Hall of Fame and naming all some key characters and one of them was a lady named Ms. Fannye Cook. And turns out that you’re an expert in this topic. And one of the most amazing things he told me that I just did not know is as blessed as the state of Mississippi is with natural resource and correspondence of wildlife and habitat. We were the last state in the lower 48 to make a department of natural resources because of someone named Fannye Cook from Copiah County. How did you become, and everybody says, Cathy, your buddy Cathy’s the expert.

Cathy Shropshire: Well, Libby Hartfield knows a whole lot too. She was an editor on the book. Yeah, she knows, you can talk to her and she can provide information, I can’t. Well, she started, she was the spearhead behind the creation of the state Game and Fish commission and the museum. So when I went to work for the museum, of course, I immediately, because it’s the Fannye Cook memorial, maybe nobody sees that, but it’s overwhelmed.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never seen it.

Cathy Shropshire: And in the museum, there’s an exhibit of her office and things that she had in the office. It’s like when you go into the exhibit hall, it’s just to your left on the outside, what I call the outside row of exhibits. And so, we just always knew about her because her collections were there, her collections from the WPA times were there. So we just always knew who Ms. Cook was.

Ramsey Russell: My kids were raised in the natural science museum, I’ll bet you all 3 of them, especially since it moved over to the LeFleur’s Bluff, that was one of mama’s favorite getaways to take to kids. And they would spend all day long, 2 or 3 times a week, sometimes prowling the halls. And of course, because of what that museum represents, with the aquariums and the collections and the dioramas, my garage became a natural science museum that we still tell stories about. Talk about working there for the museum a little bit, Cathy. What was it like and what did it appeal to? And besides just a collection of stuff from the state of Mississippi, what did that museum represent to the public and to the scientific community?

Cathy Shropshire: It’s the natural history of our state. Now, you have said something that all too many people say, we have an abundance of natural resources, and we do. In 1920, was that abundance available to people?

Ramsey Russell: Nobody in the country had it.

Cathy Shropshire: Well, yeah, nobody in the country had it. There had been droughts, there had been floods, there was over hunting, there was people didn’t care.

Ramsey Russell: Forestry, commercial clearing.

Cathy Shropshire: I mean, nobody really fully appreciated what we had until Ms. Cook, and I don’t say just her, but she was the one, I guess, that was spearheaded that just kept driving for it. So, the museum represents, because of the collections that she made back in the 1920s and 1930s, what was there then? And now we continue to collect and look and see what’s there now. And we can look and compare those things. Is this better? Is it worse? What’s out there? What’s changed?

Ramsey Russell: Baseline monitoring.

Cathy Shropshire: Baseline monitoring, that sort of thing. And they have geneticists now that work there that you can work on those kinds of things, which we certainly didn’t have when I was there, for instance, when we had the oil spill on the coast, people wanted to say what was harmed? Well, do we know everything that was there? Probably not, because we’d not done those baseline surveys. That when we have some major disaster happen, how do we recreate it? I don’t know. What was there? We don’t know. We need to have that baseline monitoring, that baseline information so that we know what’s there and what’s changed. And now we have these invasive species because we’re going back to these places and looking at them. So it provides that information that helps us for the future.

Ramsey Russell: What was your role when you were talking about being the focusing on mammals at the museum? Talk about what exactly you did and what the processes were. Because that sounds very interesting to me.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, well, some instances, you wait till it comes to you, like the bears, because they were protected at that time. So when a black bear came in, I would take it to a taxidermist, get it skinned, and then we clean the skeleton and use that as part of the collections, too. Because when they started trying to decide whether to list the black bear or not, we had to figure out what subspecies it was. And so they looked at skull morphology to determine those things.

Ramsey Russell: Like you said, it wasn’t genetics back then.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, we didn’t use that. It was morphology that they were using back then. And so we had some of those bears in our collections that they could measure and say, oh, yeah, these are more alike than those. This looks like the luteolus rather than americanus. And so that was one thing I did. I collected bats, snap trapped mice.

Ramsey Russell: Was it a lot? So it was a lot of field work, too, wasn’t it?

Cathy Shropshire: It was field work and then education, because you take that information that you learn in the field and translate it to education programs and helping with exhibits and providing the right information and publications, which we would get, sometimes you would get people who were not in the education part, but the PR part of departments say, and they’re doing a publication, and they had the cutest little squirrel on there with these cute little things in its ears and were like, no, that’s a Kaibab squirrel. We don’t have those. It’s like going back and saying, yeah, let me proof this for you, because that really wouldn’t be the right thing. And yes, that’s a lovely deer, but it’s a mule deer. Sorry, you don’t do that. And then of course, then in 1979, in April of 1979 we have the flood.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Cathy Shropshire: And that set us back a while. We had to completely move everything out of the museum and redo everything, all the exhibits and collections.

Ramsey Russell: The museum located on Lafleur’s bluff at the time? It was downtown, wasn’t it?

Cathy Shropshire: It next to the naval reserve program, directly behind the old capitol. In the floodplain backed up to the railroad tracks there.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Cathy Shropshire: And so it got 3ft of water.

Ramsey Russell: We had just moved to Hinds county when the flood of 1979. That was our first spring. Welcome to Hinds county.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, welcome to Hinds county.

Ramsey Russell: It was devastating.

Cathy Shropshire: It was horrible. It was absolutely horrible.

Ramsey Russell: And you were working there at the time?

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh.

Cathy Shropshire: It was pretty grim. It was very depressing. I don’t know what else to say, it was horrible. I don’t want to ever do that again.

Ramsey Russell: Who was Ms. Fannye Cook, for whom the museum is named? Who was she? Where was she from? How did she grow up?

Cathy Shropshire: Ms. Cook was born in Crystal Springs, that’s why we were down there earlier today, trying to get a little feel for her from where she grew up. She was one of 10 children. Her father was a farmer and grew tomatoes like all good Crystal Springs people. And she went to the industrial institute and college, which is now Mississippi University for Women today, I don’t know, maybe something else tomorrow, I don’t know, but right now. And she went there and studied History and English really and got her degree and taught History and English in, throughout the state and I think Tupelo and Beauregard, Mississippi, down in south of Crystal Springs. And she even went to the University of Colorado in Boulder and studied History and English one summer.

Ramsey Russell: I’m trying to make that’s a quantum leap, History and English and traveling around as an English teacher and yet having such a profound connection to the natural resources that her legacy has anything to do but English.

Cathy Shropshire: But she’s kind of like me. She took a route.

Ramsey Russell: When you come to a fork in road, take it.

Cathy Shropshire: When you come to the fork and road, her sister and her brother in law went to Panama. He was working on the Panama Canal at the time. She went down there and stayed two years and taught. She went to Lander, Wyoming and was principal of the high school there in 1917 and then she moved to Washington DC. Now we’re getting closer. So she worked. I know she didn’t like this. She worked for the IRS for 6 years. And while she did that, she began taking classes at Georgetown University to get her Master’s in Ornithology.

Ramsey Russell: Really? So I probably just being in it, working for the IRS back in those days, sitting at a cubicle looking at numbers. But I wonder, somewhere in that chronology, something sparked an interest for her to take a course in ornithology.

Cathy Shropshire: And I think what it was, we don’t. We’ve got some indications she was involved with a plant group, and was a member of that, that did field trips and birding trips. And I think that’s where she – I think she probably always had an interest. But a woman in the 1911 going to school, you think, what were your possibilities of having a biology, doing something with Biology.

Ramsey Russell: On a timeline, if you look back to the American timeline, of course, a lot of this took place in the mid to late 1800s, the whole awareness that ladies fashions with all these birds on their hat. But really, at that time, in social circles, especially up in that part of the world, there would have been a lot of conversation about conservation, I would think.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. Her major professor was the first person to band birds.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Cathy Shropshire: Paul Barch.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. She was influenced, and I think it was probably because we have letters from people who talk about outings and things like that, and she found some little membership cards and things. So she was involved, and I think that piqued her interest. And maybe because she also worked in the Smithsonian Natural Science Museum for a while and there were women working there then I think maybe she thought, okay, yeah, these people are doing it, maybe I can do this. Her family was very supportive of anything she wanted to do. So I don’t think it was something, if she didn’t go into it immediately, I don’t think it was anything that her family was saying, oh, no, you need to do something you can get a job.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder what brought her back to Mississippi.

Fannye Cook’s Mission: A Comprehensive Plant and Animal Survey.

Well, she right then said, no, we are going to, I have found my mission. We’re going to do a plant and animal survey the Mississippi, and we’re going to have publications that tell us what is here in Mississippi.

Cathy Shropshire: I’ll tell you. I can tell you that, I know exactly what brought her back to Mississippi. So as part of her schoolwork, she had to do a, this is a long story, but she had to do a literature review of the publications on Flora and Fauna of Mississippi, and she found 2. One done in 1850 by BLC Wales that the legislature paid for this survey of plants and animals. And the specimens were to go to the University of Mississippi. And you can still get it it’s okay, but it’s very sketchy, it’s not very complete to cover all that he was trying to cover. And then in 1921, E.N Lo wrote the Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mississippi. And at the time Fannye was looking, those were the only two publications she could find. Well, she right then said, no, we are going to, I have found my mission. We’re going to do a plant and animal survey the Mississippi, and we’re going to have publications that tell us what is here in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: Would she have been, like, come home to do that survey as a function of her relationship with Smithsonian?

Cathy Shropshire: No. What she did, I don’t think – No. So she continued her study, she was 34 when she went back to go to graduate school. She collected as part of her studies throughout Mississippi, and that’s when she saw what we mentioned earlier, the droughts and the fires and the game hogs and the unlicensed trappers and indifference by the public, all that was going on in Mississippi. And she said, we need an education program here to tell people about natural resources and the importance, and we need a conservation effort going here. So she dropped out of school and came back to start working on that education program and legislation. So that was in 1926 that she came back.

Ramsey Russell: My goodness. It’s just, on the one hand, that’s 100 years ago. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that people, as recently as 100 years ago in the great state of Mississippi, we’re still living and interacting with nature the same way people had for thousands of years, just bushmeat. The only season was salt and pepper and lard.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. And so in 1926, her brother was a representative, so they proposed legislation. And as I’ve read recently, they got darn close to getting that legislation passed in 1926. And basically, what happens is the legislature just ran out of time before they could do it. I think it may be passed the house, but they just ran out of time.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the following year would have been a great flood.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. And they were only having legislative session every 2 years. So they were only doing that every 2 years. So in the meantime, she said she realized that she needed more people to help push her, that she alone with her brother, they needed more people involved. So she started the Mississippi Association for the Conservation of Wildlife at Mississippi State. And Doctor Harnard, who was biology teacher there, was the president, and she was executive secretary. Yeah. And so they began to recruit organizations like, well, the DAR and the PTA’s and the education department and hunting and fishing clubs and American clubs and garden clubs, people to join and start being a voice for conservation in Mississippi. And it still took 6 years before that legislation passed. It took another 2 sessions before she got it passed.

Ramsey Russell: So in that 6 years or so, she’s also doing a survey at the time.

Cathy Shropshire: She’s doing some collecting at the time, but not a lot.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Cathy Shropshire: That comes later when she gets WPA money is when she does her major –

Ramsey Russell: First, The Department of Natural Resources had to be founded, right? Is that when this came along, the founding of MDWFP?

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. The Game & Fish was established in, the legislation passed March 1^st, 1932. So it was in July that would have been when it was official, I guess in July of that year. So the first people that were hired were the executive director and the secretary. And then in September Ms. Cook was hired.

Ramsey Russell: 1932, she rolled up her sleeve and committed herself to the conservation of Mississippi natural resources and working at a grassroots level. Boy, she must have been an energetic ball of fire to organize a grassroots movement.

Cathy Shropshire: And she was not the frontman a lot of times. In reading these letters that I’ve been working at archives lately and reading these letters, she’s letting the men who have the connections talk to the senators. She has some connections, but she’s –

Ramsey Russell: She’s like odds behind the curtains, pulling the strings and pulling the levers.

Cathy Shropshire: Just keeping it going. Just the constant letters, the constant reminders, we got to do this, we need to have a convention.

Ramsey Russell: She was committed.

Cathy Shropshire: She was definitely committed. Oh yeah. Because she was doing all this with no salary.

Ramsey Russell: That reminds me of a quote and I don’t know what verbatim can’t quote it from heart that Benjamin Franklin said, “it’s amazing that things can be done if you not worried about who gets credit”.

Cathy Shropshire: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s kind of what she operated under, isn’t it?

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. And also the thing that I missed during some of that is in 1928, some of your listeners will know, Aldo Leopold came to Mississippi and did a real quick survey of the situation.

Ramsey Russell: I never heard that story. The father of wildlife management, Aldo Leopold, who in that era was at the forefront of the conservation movement actually came to the state of Mississippi and did a survey.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. He was hired by some gun manufacturer, I think, to do surveys throughout different states. And Mississippi was one that he came to and he wrote up his report, and that was just added fire. No longer was it just kind of Ms. Cooke saying, we’ve got problems. Here’s Aldo Leopold saying, your populations are not good and just that added influence of somebody who people were listening to at the time.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a wonder back in that day and age now because Mississippi is a land into itself politically and culturally. It’s a wonder they listen to, no matter what his name was or who he was, that they listened to somebody from Wisconsin.

Cathy Shropshire: Well, he got with Stoddard.

Ramsey Russell: I’m just being sincere here.

Cathy Shropshire: He got with Stoddard, with quail and turkeys and things and Nash Buckingham. I don’t know if you know Nash Buckingham. She had conversations with him. He was supportive of efforts. People knew each other then. And so, all of that just, it kind of worked together coming from different areas to –

Ramsey Russell: And I read something online doing just a little bit of research on Ms. Cook. And she had written a letter to maybe the curator to Smithsonian, to somebody one of her connections up nowhere and had expressed interest in being the director of the newly founded department of Wildlife Fisheries and Park in Mississippi. What’s the backstory on that?

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, the backstory of that is that is what we thought for a long time because we had Paul Barch, I mentioned him earlier, he was her professor at Georgetown. And she wrote to him a lot during those 6 years of just needing support and encouragement and that sort of thing. Well, when the department was established, she wrote to him and he wrote back this letter that said, well, no, I don’t think, the director position is good for a woman, blah, blah. But her letter to him had said, I thought about asking to be southern commissioner, but that’s an unpaid position, and I’ve got to have some money because I’ve been working without money. And I thought about whatever it was called conservation, whatever the head of it was, it wasn’t executive director at the time. But she said, I don’t want the law enforcement problems that are going to come with that. I think that the position of research and education is best fit for me. And he was agreeing with her and saying, no, executive director wouldn’t be good. So really he was agreeing with something she had said.

Ramsey Russell: Because he had said she would be an ideal candidate to do the surveys and do the initial research stuff. Do you know whether or not, when they passed that legislation that they had intended for there to be a natural science museum?

Cathy Shropshire: No.

Ramsey Russell: Or did that come later?

Cathy Shropshire: That came later.

Ramsey Russell: How much later?

Cathy Shropshire: It came, let’s see, probably in the 40s. Okay, go down that rabbit hole now. So let’s see. So the Game & Fish was created in 1932. She starts some restoration projects, fish restoration projects. She starts getting information from the game warden. Back then, she had the game wardens keep up with the game animals they saw and how many they saw and where they saw them. So we literally have reports that say, saw 2 raccoons today, saw 3 squirrels today. I mean, this is how bad it was that people were writing these are the big things that we saw today. She also started surveys of the commercial fishermen to find out what they caught and how much money they made. Because not only the resource, but how important monetarily, is this resource to us? And then also trappers.

Ramsey Russell: It’s amazing she was smart enough to put all that together.

Cathy Shropshire: Well, she had spent time with the biological survey in Washington and at the Natural Science Museum. Yeah, at the Natural Science Museum, it’s part of the Smithsonian. And she was well read, she knew other states and people from other states. She went to meetings, to national meetings and so she knew what was going on.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, to be from Mississippi and then come back decades later and be the energy behind the formation of a body, a political body that led to the conservation. She came at it from a 30,000ft view.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Not just what do we got, but the values, societal and cultural. I mean, money is political influence. If it ain’t worth nothing, it really don’t matter to a politician. And she saw all that back then and brought that to bear.

A Vision for a Permanent Museum.

They had about 500 people out collecting, doing taxidermy, doing artwork, doing exhibits, doing educational programs all over the state. And so that’s where the bulk of the natural science museums collections come from, is that WPA collections in the 1930s.

Cathy Shropshire: Right. Well, so in 1935, the Works Project Administration, which was one of the WPA projects during the Great Depression, came to her and said, do you have a project that we’ve got money that can you do this project? And she’s going, my plant and animal survey that I wanted back in 1926, I can do with this money. So she got with the universities and colleges and universities in the state, and they signed on to it, and they would provide space and expertise. And she ended up with 18 colleges and museums in colleges and universities and in 4 high schools. They had about 500 people out collecting, doing taxidermy, doing artwork, doing exhibits, doing educational programs all over the state. And so that’s where the bulk of the natural science museums collections come from, is that WPA collections in the 1930s. And when that money ran out, she decided she wanted, that’s when she said, and she’d had exhibits in different places throughout the Jackson area and I think the lobby of the Robert E. Lee building and different places. But she wanted a real museum. And they found a space in the old asylum on North State street that’s right there next to, and apparently was very grim. Not only was it the old asleep, it was right there.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the one that no other state agency wanted.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, there were several reasons for that. So she sent her the exhibits up in there and for several years ran the museum out of that building until it absolutely they had to move because they were kid condemned it, and they had to move out because they were going to demolish it.

Ramsey Russell: You know, when you look back in time and I hear this story about this tireless fountain of energy that was working with universities and state and federal governments and everything else, you know, break, break. If I needed to reach Cathy, I pull out my iPhone and call her or I Google, I need to get in touch with the Natural Science Museum or I need to get in touch with somebody and I mean, it’s just minutes and seconds and key taps away, she must have had powerful hands just for all the letters she wrote.

Cathy Shropshire: You have hit it. I mean, I have said that working on the archives in history recently, I don’t know how they got anything done because they were busy writing letters back and forth to each other, I honestly don’t. Because she would write a letter, whoever she sent would write it back, blah, blah. They used the phone some, but they also used telegrams.

Ramsey Russell: Back in the day. You picked it up and go, hey, Sarah, call me Ole Miss if you pass me through.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. So, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And they got it done.

Cathy Shropshire: And they got it done.

Ramsey Russell: I saw a picture of Ms. Cook and I don’t know when in the timeline this would have fallen, certainly the museum was done. She had her WPA funding and she spent a lot of time out in the field and it was a very classical photograph of her, black and white. And she’s got on the tall lace up boots and a pantaloon pants.

Cathy Shropshire: John Pruitt.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I mean, she looked the part of the biologist back then.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. She loved the fieldwork and there’s lots of stories about her going out in the field and going out with – so she was 43 when she started working for the museum, I mean, for the Game & Fish commission. So, she’s on into her 50s, she’s still out there collecting. And I guess they probably, she had game wardens that went with her a lot of times, and she wrote about the game wardens that would see her while fishing, she’d be out there saying, and they’re like, you can’t eat those things, she’s catching darters and minnows and things that she’s all excited about, and they’re like, can’t eat them. I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: Right, what’s the point?

Cathy Shropshire: And then there’s a wonderful story that she was in the delta not duck hunting, but collecting, and she shot a duck, and it fell in the water, and the warden wouldn’t go get it, he said it was too cold. So she just stripped down to her little teddies and walked out there and got it. And I fully believe that could have happened.

Ramsey Russell: She just had that kind of grit and determination. Are there any memoirs of what – Okay, so she went and did this survey and kicked this off. But what did she seem to personally enjoy most about this? Was it the mammals? Was it the birds? Was it the fieldwork? Was it the contribution to science?

Cathy Shropshire: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Cathy Shropshire: Yes, I think to all of that. After she retired, she started the Mississippi Ornithological Society. And she talks about her love of nature. She said, they say I have a love affair with nature, and I suppose I do. And she would talk about every year at this time of year, she would get in a little boat and go out in the Gulf of Mexico, past the islands, and wait for the migratory birds to come in, and they would land on her and on the boat, and she would band some, and they would go back with her. And some of those birds returned to her year after year.

Ramsey Russell: She had a real understanding of a lot of different facets of the outdoors, didn’t she? I wonder if she, growing up in Copiah County, even back in those days, the fact that later in her career as a museum curator, she did go out and collect specimens with a shotgun. Do you know whether or not she hunted as a child or -?

Cathy Shropshire: I don’t know. I know she hunted later. She had her little gun, she hunted later.

Ramsey Russell: She wasn’t sport hunting or recreationally hunting? She was collecting hunting?

Cathy Shropshire: No, it was both. She would go, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What did she hunt?

Cathy Shropshire: Well, I know ducks and deer.

Ramsey Russell: Was my kind of person. She was a duck hunter.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, she can’t be very good because there weren’t that many around, but she went anyway as far as deer.

Ramsey Russell: It occurred to me a little while ago when you were describing something that it’s been a long time since I was at the Natural Science Museum, that’s where we should have met, as a plan A. But I do remember as you walking back from the lobby into one part of that museum, I do remember they do have a display with a desk that looks like a natural sort of scientist or an old professor. And I do remember that I’m going to go back and take a look at that one day. Are a lot of her collections and exhibits, because I read somewhere that she taught herself taxidermy, or maybe she learned that it Smithsonian. But a lot of the stuff like the duck that she went collected, she then brought home and skinned out and mounted and preserved for museum displays.

Cathy Shropshire: Unfortunately, some of those were lost during the 1979 flood.

Ramsey Russell: Terrible.

Cathy Shropshire: Some of those old exhibits. And how many of those she actually did and how much were by taxidermists that were hired or people that were hired to do taxidermy, they weren’t necessarily taxidermists, I don’t really know. But she could do it because we’ve got letters of people saying, could you stuff this owl for me or something?

Ramsey Russell: How long was she the museum curator?

Cathy Shropshire: So she started the museum downtown in 40 something, and she retired in 58 because she had to. Because she was 69, and you had to retire by age 70.

Ramsey Russell: She’d have probably still been working.

Cathy Shropshire: Oh, yeah, because she did, actually, she did continue to work on the fishes of Mississippi, and that was published a year later.

Ramsey Russell: With all that federal funding, the WTA funding, and now we got maybe a little bit of state funding, I don’t know. Was she able to hire staff? Did she have a staff doing the stuff or was it a one man power house?

Cathy Shropshire: The WPA project went away, she had, I think she never had maybe an education person, a secretary and a janitor. They didn’t support her real well within the agency.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think that the politics were as bad then as now? Because there’s a term that I heard at Dorman hall way back in the day, Cathy, we’re all there doing wildlife biology, but you’d hear these terms in the classroom, biopolitics. There’s a lot of political influence in the world of biology, and to this day, I mean, there’s some issues going on in the state of Mississippi that science don’t have anything to do with. It’s got to do with politics, personal politics.

Cathy Shropshire: Sure, it’s just the way things are. Too many people don’t really appreciate the natural resources and what we get from them that we don’t have to pay for. We get clean air, we don’t have to be out there cleaning the air, these trees are doing it for us. If we were a little more cognizant of what we get for free from nature, we might take better care of it.

Ramsey Russell: Cathy, how did Ms. Cook influence wildlife conservation in the state of Mississippi?

Cathy Shropshire: Well, just the mere fact that she basically created the Mississippi Game & Fish Commission and all that has come from that with the fisheries division and the game division and hunter education and the museum and education programs that are available and the outreach that they have had in Mississippi is mind blowing. The economic impact and just the impact to wildlife that we have now is, it’s incredible. We had very few deer at the time, we had very few beaver at the time. I mean, we’ve got wildlife populations that were almost extinct before her time. So she had, I guess, awakened people that not only they forget that, when you don’t have it, you tend to forget that you ever had it. She awakened them to the fact that, no, you had it and you’re missing out on some wonderful experiences.

Ramsey Russell: You know what interests me in the story of Ms. Fannye Cook, and I think you’ve done a great job describing this, is how one person, one, can have such a profound impact on the world around one dedicated person, one person, even before the Internet and cell phones, one person that dedicated themselves to something, had such a profound impact.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah. What’s the quote? It’s something like that. And then it says, “Indeed that’s all there ever has been, is one person with one idea”.

Ramsey Russell: That’s really, I guess, all there ever has been. How would you describe Ms. Cook’s legacy? Or what does it mean to you, Cathy?

Cathy Shropshire: It makes me very proud that she had the vision and the energy and the willpower and the ability to see her dreams come true. She dreamed of doing a statewide plant and animals survey, and she saw that happen. She dreamed of a museum that would, even back in the 40s that would have education programs and a staff of curators and outreach throughout the state. And that has come to fruition. Maybe she didn’t get to see it, but she set all those wheels in motion that today we have exactly what her dream was is to be able to educate the people of Mississippi and the world about the importance of conservation in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: You probably didn’t know much about Ms. Fannye cook when you took the job at the museum.

Cathy Shropshire: Didn’t know a thing about her. No.

Ramsey Russell: How did her legacy and her influence affect you? Because bound to be one of them when you come to fork in the road take it, influential moments as you learned about someone that has a lot of parallels to your own life.

Cathy Shropshire: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And now you’re walking in this lady’s shoes.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah, I mean, I tried to do that. I haven’t. I did an impersonation of her for several years when trying to promote the book. No, I tried to check Ms. Fannye as best I could because she makes me very proud to be a biologist and to see what she was able to accomplish. And she didn’t want the glory of it, she just wanted to see it done. She didn’t have to get awards. In fact, if you ever see her getting an award or even just being interviewed and pictures taken, she’s very uncomfortable, it looks like. She does not want to be the person out there waving the flag, she wants to be out there, the cheerleader and the person that says, this is how we do, this is what we need to do.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of sincere scientists and field biologists and forestry types that vocation speaks to them because they don’t have to be in front of people.

Cathy Shropshire: Right.

Ramsey Russell: They’re very comfortable out there in nature collecting and kind of living in their own head.

Cathy Shropshire: But what she found out, and I’m as guilty as the next person. I don’t want to be behind a desk, I want to be outdoors and be with wildlife because I don’t want to be around people and I think that any wildlife biologist knows that 90% of what you would do is working with people. You’re going to spend a whole lot of time working with people.

Ramsey Russell: It really doesn’t matter what career you’re in, my job, your job, his job, their job, it’s all people business.

Cathy Shropshire: Right.

Ramsey Russell: The world is people.

Cathy Shropshire: The world is people. And so you’re going to have to end up getting your message across somehow, stand up there and say what needs to be said or get somebody else to say it for you. But you’ve got to get out there in front of the legislature or the garden clubs and the PTA’s and the hunting and fishing clubs and all those other things that.

Ramsey Russell: You got to get up and communicate.

Cathy Shropshire: You got to get up and communicate.

Ramsey Russell: Whatever became of Ms. Cook?

Cathy Shropshire: When she retired she continued, that’s when she established the Mississippi Ornithological Society and she continued to lead field trips all over the state and birding field trips. And we last field trip she took, and we think it might have been with a group of scouts because she did a lot of that, it was April 29^th, 1964, and the next day she passed away.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Cathy Shropshire: So she was doing what she loved to do right up to the very end.

Ramsey Russell: How old would she have been then?

Cathy Shropshire: 78 something. Maybe not quite that old.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. Circle back around, because you spent a lot of time with state agencies and NGOs and universities, and I’m going to come back to a point you made a while back about her 30,000ft view and the importance of economics. Do you think that during her career, the legislator ever appreciated the economic benefit wildlife? And do you think it’s changed since?

Cathy Shropshire: Even at her time, she was responsible for putting together the biennial reports for the agency, and she would put in there how much economic input from trapping and commercial fishing and that sort of thing. So there was information, license sales and all that was in there. And so that information was there, and the legislature would understand it to some extent, I guess. But I felt when I was working that people, not just the legislature, legislature, but also people, just have no idea the economic input of natural resources in Mississippi and all the jobs that it creates and the sales of camping equipment and outdoor equipment and guns and rods and reels and all of that, we now get tax revenue from all that information.

Ramsey Russell: Little rural communities that have a spike during hunting season and candy bar sales, I mean, it’s the highlight of their year just in gas sales and cheese and ham and sandwich meats and groceries.

Cathy Shropshire: Right. And I don’t think they fully appreciate. I think they think it is such a high number, which I’ve since, I’ve been away again from it too long now. But it was like, right below timber and poultry industry, the impact to the economy of Mississippi. But I think that was just something that we enjoy that much couldn’t possibly be bringing in that kind of revenue. I think that’s just foreign to, how could that happen?

Ramsey Russell: Money is political relevance, period, end of discussion. But at the same time, I heard something the other day, and it’s on my mind in the world of waterfowl hunting, the southeastern United States, and I’m thinking Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, that part of the world generates almost 1/3^rd the total water fowl related expenditures in the United States. And so that’s important economically. But beyond economic, the reason we’re able to generate that much is because beyond the food, beyond the fun, beyond the economics, it speaks to our cultural identity. And here I am, I’ve been blessed to travel around and meet a lot of folks from a lot of walks of life, but hardly outside those 3 states especially. But my home state of Mississippi, wildlife, whether it’s the songbirds or the squirrels crawling up the tree or the whitetail deer or the turkeys or the ducks, I mean, wildlife is integral to our cultural identity.

Cathy Shropshire: Right, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: And as a museum curator, there’s a lot of maybe inner city folks from Jackson, Jackson metro area that still plow through those doors every day and connect to nature just through a natural science museum.

Cathy Shropshire: Right. And the things that we take for granted growing up the way I did and so many people did, you knew what raccoon was a squirrel, skunk was. But at the natural science museum, you see kids that have never seen a raccoon, they don’t know what a skunk is, maybe they probably know what a squirrel is, but they’re so removed from it, it just doesn’t relate at all.

Ramsey Russell: I got to share this story, especially to a natural science. My buddy Kevin Booth up in Utah, who sometimes listens to this podcast, came down to Mississippi and duck hunted recently and described to me in great detail them driving through the woods, going to the duck hole and him laying eyes for the first time ever in his life on his first possum. The little things that we take for granted, we ought to be proud of it. There’s value in that.

Cathy Shropshire: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to wrap it up, we started off talking about black bears and your experience with them in the earlier days, Cathy and I wonder what the black bear population might have been when Ms. Fannye Cook moved back home. It could not have been much in the state of Mississippi.

Cathy Shropshire: 6 is what I remember from, yeah, her game animals of Mississippi publication. And that Hooker’s Ridge was the last place, that was the last holdout that she mentioned, and that’s in Warren county, north of Vicksburg.

Ramsey Russell: Or don’t you wish you could go and ask her to do day that she could just spend a week walking through Hinds county or Hooker’s ridge or just through the state of Mississippi and get an understanding of how blessed we now are?

Cathy Shropshire: Oh, I think she would.

Ramsey Russell: Largely because of her.

Cathy Shropshire: Yes, I think she would. But, you know, I just feel like she would say, but you know, we could also do this. We also need to be doing this. She always got up the game. It’s like when I got this, now I want this, I think we need. I just think she would be thrilled to death to see her vision and where it is today. But I think she’d still be saying, you know, we need to collect in that stream over there. We don’t know anything about it. I think we need to do this over here.

Ramsey Russell: Whether it’s Mississippi or at the flyway level or national level or international level, the world still needs more Fannye Cooks. One committed person. One person changing. On the one hand maybe back 100 years ago, there was room for improvement, there’s still room improvement. But we’re so globally, we’re so besieged by habitat loss that, I don’t know, it just seems different than 100 years ago that maybe what she walked into, that there was room for a lot of restoration and building. And now to me, almost the focus is conserve and hold the fort. Hold what we’ve got. We can’t lose no more. But we still need that one person, don’t we?

Cathy Shropshire: Because the minute you look away, somebody’s going to be there wanting that.

Ramsey Russell: Blink and it’s gone.

Cathy Shropshire: Blink and it’s gone.

Ramsey Russell: Cathy, thank you so much. I have so enjoyed getting to see you again, enjoying our visit. Thank you so much for sharing your story. But also the story of Ms. Fannye Cook.

Cathy Shropshire: Well, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been fun. Yeah. Going down memory lane.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, you all been listening to my friend Ms. Cathy Shropshire down here in Mississippi. We’ve been talking about Ms. Fannye Cook, who almost 100 years ago came to the last of 48 states in North America and through just sheer determination and will, one person arm one person made this change and became the inception of what is now Mississippi Department of National Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks and there’s still room to grow. Who’s the next person that’s going to take over the helm in your backyard? Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.

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