Bethel society to host lecture about famed ornithologist July 21

Ornithologist William Brewster, left, sits with Dr. John George Gehring in Bethel, circa 1905. Museums of the Bethel Historical Society collection

BETHEL — Veteran birder Dana Duxbury-Fox plans to talk about her research on famed Massachusetts ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 21, in the Reading Room of the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society’s O’Neil Robinson House at 10 Broad St.

Brewster, a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, made many expeditions to the Bethel region and Lake Umbagog during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The journals he compiled over a period of nearly 40 years were published posthumously by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University as “Birds of the Lake Umbagog Region of Maine,” according to a news release from the society.

Brewster also spent time in Bethel as one of many famous patients of Dr. John George Gehring’s clinic, where he was successfully treated with hypnotic suggestion for persistent lameness in his legs.

Duxbury-Fox, of North Andover, Massachusetts, has birded worldwide for more than half a century. She and her husband, Bob Fox, were among a group of Massachusetts Audubon members who established the “Crow Patrol,” and have for several years studied, recorded and lectured on the winter crow roost along the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

This program is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society at 207-824-2908 or info@bethelhistorical.org.