NORWICH — Chris Rimmer will be retiring after 15 years at the fore of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.
“I love what I do,” he said. “I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have been able to indulge my passions and interests in a career.”
A series of unexpected twists, as he put it, brought him to a career in conservation and ornithology. He was not one of those children who come bounding out of their rooms with a pair of binoculars. But nature infiltrated his psyche as he explored the woods with his father in rural Massachusetts and caught tadpoles in a swamp.
He spent his first years at the University of Vermont studying the classics. Latin fascinated him, but he couldn’t imagine a future for himself in the field. Unsure of what to do, he took a semester off to work at Manomet, a bird observatory in Plymouth, Mass., even though he “didn’t know much about birds.”
“It lit my fire in a way I could never have anticipated,” he said. He went back to college, abandoned the classics for wildlife biology, and escaped to birdwatch whenever he could.
Over the next few years, ornithology brought him across the world from Peru to the high Arctic. He went to the University of Minnesota for five years for a Ph.D. But he forsook his degree when he “somehow managed to get the job” as the research director at the Vermont Institute for Natural Science, better known as VINS, in Quechee.
“Here was a chance to go back to Vermont, where I wanted to end up, to study birds in the field, and to work for an organization where I could stay at for a while,” he said. Not having a doctorate never stopped him from publishing his research in academic journals.
But as the years passed, he and his colleagues in the research department at VINS found that their focus on scientific research could be better pursued in a separate organization.
He and three other scientists in VINS’ conservation biology department — Kent McFarland, Rosalind Renfrew and Steve Faccio — set out on their own to found the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.
“It was a risk, honestly,” Rimmer said. “It has been the best move we ever made.”
Rimmer was responsible for the whole organization and its staff, but he never gave up his research.
“I didn’t lose the thing that fueled my desire and my excitement,” Rimmer said. “And I was able to do some things it turned out I was OK at.”
But Rimmer was more than just OK at fundraising. Under Rimmer’s 15 years of leadership, VCE’s annual budget quadrupled from $500,000 to about $2 million.
He steered the young nonprofit through challenging times. The Great Recession of 2008 struck when VCE had barely established itself, but donors kept up their support throughout the downturn. And when former president Donald Trump stripped away funding for conservation, Rimmer strengthened relationships with private donors.
“In a way, it was a really good thing. It formed and strengthened some really strong and enduring relationships,” said Rimmer, ever positive.
Rimmer also built those relationships by working with citizen scientists and by leading community birdwatching outings, which he plans to do more of in retirement.
But more than his research or his fundraising success, Rimmer is proudest of the “really dynamite team” that he has assembled at VCE. “That is the future of the organization,” he said.
Over the years, Rimmer mentored many young biologists who went on to work in bird conservation. Kirsti Carr interned at VCE in 2017. She was thrilled to be at VCE, but she didn’t know whether birds would be her life’s work. That changed after her summer at VCE.
Her memories from Mount Mansfield, where she worked on the Mountain Birdwatch project, remain vivid — when Rimmer taught her how to band a Bicknell’s thrush, or when they caught a brown creeper and he showed her the tail feathers.
“Every time I see a brown creeper, I think about Chris and what he taught me up there about the birds,” she said.
The Bicknell’s thrush, a nondescript, greenish-brown songbird, has been the gravitational center of Rimmer’s research for over 30 years. The elusive, and declining, bird spends its winters in New England and its summers on just four islands in the Antilles. Only discovered in 1982, the Bicknell’s thrush was a mystery in Vermont’s backyard when Rimmer started his work.
Researchers at VCE found their niche in ornithology when they focused on mountaintop bird populations. Summits are a hard place to eke out an existence, especially with human-caused stressors including acidification, atmospheric pollution, wind turbine development and climate change, Rimmer said. And bringing attention to the rare bird benefits the other species who depend on the same fragile habitat.
Rimmer and his colleagues at VCE chose a particularly difficult bird to study. They have to climb up remote mountains where they face weather extremes. The Bicknell’s thrush is such small and subtle camouflager that it cannot spot them with the naked eye. Instead, the researchers depend on small trackers, cameras and other technology.
But the unique habitat was also a spectacular place to work.
“It has quite a marvelous song that it sings at dawn or dusk in the summer,” he said. “I had ethereal experiences at dusk on mountaintops with the clouds surging — soul-stirring.”
The Bicknell’s thrush bound New England and the Caribbean islands, and Rimmer followed the link. Every year, Rimmer went to the Antilles to study the wintering grounds.
Between 80 and 90% of the Bicknell’s thrush live on Hispaniola — the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic — where forests have been lost and degraded at an alarming rate.
“It’s not abating,” Rimmer said. He worked with locals as they set up locally driven conservation efforts to restore forest habitats on former farmland.
Even after decades of study, the Bicknell’s thrush keeps surprising Rimmer. Songbirds are known as monogamous creatures — with one mother and one father nursing a nest. But not the Bicknell’s thrush. Rimmer and his team found nests with two, sometimes even four males feeding the young of one female. Blood samples revealed that males outnumber females by more than two to one. Rimmer suspects this is because the males elbow the smaller and less aggressive females into the most dangerous and scant habitats, but they will need more evidence to confirm anything. Digging further into this irregularity will be the “swan song” of Rimmer’s research.
Rimmer, who will be 68 by the time he retires in October, looks forward to a retirement full of future grandchildren, saltwater fly fishing and birdwatching. He plans to finish research papers he never had time to write up and write a quarterly column in Northern Woodlands.
“It’s fun not knowing exactly what I’ll be doing one year from now,” he said.
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.
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