IN MEMORIAM: FRANK ALOIS PITELKA, 1916–2003

Frank Alois Pitelka, a member of the AOU since 1937, an Elective Member since 1944, and a Fellow since 1948, died of prostate cancer on 10 October 2003. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 27 March 1916. He earned his B.S. at the University of Illinois (1939) and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1946), where he remained for his entire academic career. He retired in 1985 but continued to come regularly to the campus until 1999, when failing health forced him to join his daughter in southern California. Frank's ornithological career began in the 1930s while growing up in suburban Chicago. Although he dismissed his upbringing as distinctly non-academic, early on he joined the Chicago Ornithological Society, where he was taken under the wing of several local birders, including Nellie Johnson Baroody, in whose honor he would later endow an AOU student presentation award. During his college years, Frank published eight ornithological notes and a detailed account of the breeding biology of the Black-throated Green Warbler. After graduation, Frank spent the summer of 1939 at the University of Washington's Oceanographic Laboratories in Friday Harbor, and then moved south to the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work under Alden Miller in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ). A venerable MVZ tradition during that era involved staff and students making extensive field collecting trips throughout western North America and Mexico. Frank eagerly joined several of those expeditions, and for his Ph.D. investigated variation and speciation in Aphelocoma jays. Although he presumably chose that genus because of its taxonomic interest, Frank's field observations of the jays kindled an interest in the evolution of social behavior that was to form the first of two major focuses of his research career. Frank's second major research focus was population regulation. That interest developed soon after he was hired as an Instructor in Zoology and Assistant Curator of Birds in the MVZ. Gradually, his attention shifted from taxonomy to ecology, spurred along by an invitation to work at the recently established Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) in Barrow, Alaska. Thus began an annual migration between Berkeley and Barrow that Frank undertook for 30 years as he and his students studied the population cycles of lemmings and their avian predators. Later, they investigated the behavior and ecology of other Arctic-breeding birds, particularly calidridine sandpipers. A proud and unabashed naturalist, Frank belonged to that earlier generation of field biologists for whom collecting specimens, obtaining distributional data, studying life histories, and observing behavior were of paramount importance. He was especially in his element in the stark natural beauty of northern Alaska, where he enthusiastically trundled across the tundra to collect vagrants and observe the social and reproductive behavior of the avifauna. As described memorably by David W. Norton (in Fifty Years Below Zero: Tributes and Meditations for the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory's First Half-century at Barrow, Alaska, University Alaska Press, 2001), Frank became one of the station's most colorful summer residents. Frank's bibliography comprises more than 150 publications. His professional awards include the William Brewster Memorial Medal (1980) from the AOU, the Mercer (1953) and Eminent Ecologist (1992) awards from the Ecological