‘Bird lady’ was friend to Coast wildlife, birders
Judith Toups, Sun Herald columnist, dies
JEAN PRESCOTT, jtprescott@sunherald.com
Judy Toups, the Coast’s renowned “bird lady,” is going to miss spring migration this year for what probably is the first time since her ornithological interests began in 1972. It is not by choice. Toups died quietly at home Tuesday in Decatur, Ala., of complications from medical problems. She was 77.
Overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction – of bird habitat and the property of myriad friends and acquaintances here – she moved to that small Alabama town barely a year after the storm.
Born at the front-end of the Great Depression, in 1930, Toups met and married a handsome sailor from Mississippi – Jay Toups – in Gloucester, Mass., just minutes from her hometown of Magnolia, and returned with him to his home state in 1965, the year he mustered out of the Navy. They would settle in Gulfport and raise six children there: Jeffrey, young Jay, Patrice, Christine and twins Drayton and Desmond.
Toups’ parents realized, on one of their visits to the Coast, that a stay-home mom of six young children desperately needed a diversion. Someone bought a feeder. Someone else identified a bird, and Toups was off and running.
Everyone who knew her has an extraordinary personal story to tell.
Coast artist and veteran birder Alison Henry recalled her first field trip with Toups: “Here I was meeting the rock star of birding.” As the group gathered in the pre-dawn blackness, “Judy said, ‘Oh, good, everybody’s here. Now all we have to do is wait for the birds to wake up.’ I thought it quite remarkable. She was a brilliant teacher, a best friend and an honest critic. I was addicted to her as a person.”
Don McKee, another Toups friend and fan said Tuesday, “My opinion is that all of nature has lost a very dear friend, especially our avian friends. She will be remembered always as the mother of birdwatching in Mississippi. I don’t think of her as gone,” McKee said. “Today she’s soaring with the eagles.”
This writer’s personal story goes something like this: In the late 1980s, she performed a daring rescue of a sharp-shinned hawk from the front screened porch of a house where we lived in Bay St. Louis. The bird had barreled through the screen in pursuit of a squirrel and had been trapped on the porch, disoriented and unable to find the door and freedom. With only a quilt between her and sharp beak and talons, Toups dropped the bed covering over this formidable raptor, and with yours truly carrying the trailing tails of the quilt, she carried the swaddled bird outside and let it go.
What a woman.
At that point she had been writing a weekly column for the Sun Herald for 15 years; nearly 20 more years would follow.
Toups founded the Mississippi Coast Audubon Society and advanced its conservation causes, including the high-profile protection program for least terns and black skimmers, “Nest in Peace.”
She taught Seashore Methodist Assembly elderhostels and sent fledgling birders out across Coast terrain in search of native and visiting birds. Birders from every part of the United States knew her.
She developed the Mississippi Coastal Birding Trail map, and wrote two books on birding the Gulf Coast, plus innumerable articles for every birding journal ever published in late 20th-century America.
There is a trail named after Judy Toups in Jackson County’s Ward Bayou, and she has been honored by birding societies too numerous to count.
Daughter Christine Toups remembered, “Just a couple of weeks ago, I told her, ‘I plugged your name into Google, and almost 20,000 entries came up, Mom. You’ve been Googled.’
“She calmly turned to me and said, ‘Funny, I didn’t feel a thing.’”
Typical Toups.
Peck Funeral Home in Decatur is in charge of arrangements, which were incomplete Tuesday.
