About Dr. Archie Carr

Archie Fairly Carr, Jr., was born on June 16, 1909, in Mobile Alabama, where his father was a Presbyterian minister and his mother a piano teacher. His keen ear for language and music developed early: as a child he learned Gullah, the lyrical dialect of coastal, southern blacks; this linguistic ability few other whites shared. In later years he developed his language skills by collecting dialects from the Caribbean area and east Africa.

He got his doctorate, the first granted in zoology by the University of Florida, under the supervision of professor J. Speed Rogers, a limnologist. The entomologist Theodore Hubbell also influenced him strongly, as did the great animal ecologist W. C. Allee, who taught him the importance of ecological organization. Allee, who had been paralyzed by an accident, was carried around the Florida countryside in a wheelchair by the zoology graduate students. Although he learned ecology early, his first professional accomplishments were in taxonomy and evolutionary biology.

Archie Carr’s family life was as rich and full as his professional career, and was thoroughly intertwined with it. He married Marjorie Harris in 1937; she is a biologist and distinguished conservationist in her own right. They had five children, one daughter who is a professional actress, and four sons who have pursued careers in conservation biology.

Archie Carr spent his summers with Thomas Barbour, at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. It was Barbour who first expanded his horizons and gave him confidence in his own rapidly maturing intellectual powers. Barbour was the most important single person in Archie Carr’s formative years as a biologist. They were very close, and Barbour often came to Gainesville, Florida, to visit the Carrs. Barbour, a man of boundless enthusiasm for life, taught by example that it was proper to glory in the natural world – to savor and enjoy it. Margie Carr still remembers seeing the elderly Barbour outside in the Florida dusk with tears streaming down his cheeks because he could no longer hear the high notes of the chorusing cricket and tree frogs.

At the MCZ, Archie Carr also cultivated his appreciation for exotic foods, at the sumptuous meals that “T.B.” served. During these years, he co-authored with Barbour Antillean Terrapins, a monograph describing new turtles from Cuba, Haiti, and the Bahamas. The Windward Road was dedicated to Barbour’s memory.

Archie Carr was on leave from the University of Florida, teaching biology in Spanish at Wilson Popenoe’s Escuela Agricola Panamericana in Honduras. This was when he first became familiar with the forests and peoples of Central America (described in his book, High Jungles and Low, University of Florida Press, 1953). Ten years later he added to his Central American experience with a two-year stay at the University of Costa Rica.

He also won the John Burroughs Medal of the American Museum of Natural History for nature writing. His Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of The United States, Canada, and Baja California, published in 1952 by Cornell University Press and still in print, was a model of authoritative yet lively scientific writing, winning Daniel Giraud Elliott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. Archie Carr wrote 10 books and more than 120 scientific papers and magazine articles during his career of more than half a century.

He loved the sounds and rhythms of English. For those of us gathered in the Casa Verde after an evening walking the turtle beach, hearing Archie recite from memory Jabberwocky or a comic poem by P.G. Wodehouse with the accompaniment of the night sounds of the jungle and the Caribbean surf was an experience of a lifetime.

And he was equally adept with the written word. His chapter “The Black Beach” in The Windward Road, published by Knopf in 1956, won an O. Henry Award (Best Short Stories of 1956).

Despite achieving Graduate Research Professor status at the University of Florida, Archie Carr continued teaching his community ecology course. Known for his engaging field trips, Carr integrated zoology, botany, geology, and cultural anthropology to paint vibrant landscapes for his students. His demonstrations with local wildlife added memorable experiences to his teachings. His study of sea turtle migration and navigation was supported by Military Air Transport Service privileges, allowing him to travel worldwide on U.S. military aircraft. His research spanned the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, northeastern South America, Pacific Central America, east Africa, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and more.

It was his father who instilled in Archie Carr his love of animate and inanimate nature, and the backyard of his home in Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up was filled with cages of snakes, lizards, and turtles. He was an avid hunter, but lost his taste for it in Africa, a change that he described in his book Ulendo: Travels of a Naturalist in and out of Africa, published by Knopf in 1964.

Some of his research was done at sea; in 1978, he took part in the Green Turtle Expedition of the R.V. Alpha Helix in the waters off Costa Rica and Nicaragua. His knowledge of world ecosystems was legendary – it is said that when Time-Life Books was starting its meticulously researched series of natural history books, the editors offered him his choice of continents to write about. He chose Africa.

On May 21, 1987 Dr. Archie Carr died at his home on Wewa Pond near the town of Micanopy, Florida, on May 21, 1987. At the time of his death, he was the world’s leading authority on sea turtles, a tropical field ecologist of exceptional skill and experience, a brilliant writer for audiences of both scientific and popular literature, a distinguished taxonomist and evolutionary biologist, and an internationally acclaimed advocate of conservation.