Anthony Hemingway Bledsoe, 1956–2019

Abstract

Anthony Hemingway “Tony” Bledsoe died at the age of 62 on September 14, 2019. Tony was an outstanding ornithologist, life-long birdwatcher, and most of all an inspirational teacher of ecology and evolution. He was an Elective Member (1990) of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), Director of the Ornithological Societies of North America (1998–2000), Assistant to the AOU Treasurer (1996–2000), a key organizer of the AOU’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh (1989), and a founding member of the Connecticut Ornithological Association (1983). Tony was born to Carter and Phyllis Bledsoe in Washington, D.C., on October 10, 1956, but grew up on the Main Line of Philadelphia, graduating from Lower Merion High School. As a young natural history enthusiast, he volunteered to work in the collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where he was inspired to “think clearly” about evolutionary issues by Frank Gill and herpetologist Tom Uzzell. Following high school, Tony attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he honed his birdwatching and natural history skills. In 1978, he started his PhD studies in the laboratory of Charles Sibley at Yale University. At the time molecular systematics was a small field, and studies using DNA were rare. With huge intellectual curiosity and boyish naiveté, Tony jumped into the program and soon became an expert in all aspects of phylogenetics. At the time, cladistic morphology was in its full glory, and antipathy toward Sibley’s DNA hybridization, which was viewed (inaccurately) as phenetic and thus hopelessly flawed, led to epic philosophical battles. Tony threw his substantial intellectual powers into those battles and helped guide the Sibley school through much of the fray. Tony’s graduate studies were focused on the adaptive radiation of 9-primaried oscines. It seems quaint today, but he spent many years obtaining DNA-hybridization comparisons of just 27 bird species. Nevertheless, literally everything he discovered about the relationships of those birds (e.g., the radical observation that South American “emberizids” clustered with tanagers rather than sparrows) has endured the test of time and been confirmed by modern DNA sequencing studies. In the process of his PhD studies, Tony became an expert in what we now call genomics. DNA hybridization compared large segments of bird DNA (the “single-copy” genome) and required a substantial understanding of genomic structure and data analysis. In 1984, Tony finished his PhD and began a series of postdocs, first as a Guyer Fellow at the University of Wisconsin (1985–1986), then as a Rea Fellow at the Carnegie