# RIP Harry Butler



## Ramsayi (Dec 13, 2015)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-12/conservationist-harry-butler-dies-of-cancer-at-85/7023708


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## rockethead (Dec 13, 2015)

harry butler the barefoot bushman, Malcom douglas, steve Irwin some of my favourite tv shows as I was growing up.
all sadly missed by all our members


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## Ryan-James (Dec 14, 2015)

x 2, we grew up watching Les Hiddin, Alby Mangle, Malcom Douglas, Leyland brothers and of course the barefoot bushman Harry Butler.
Such a shame, he had done great things as a naturalist.

Old Bear Grylls has nothing on these guys regardless of how much urine he drink in one sitting.


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## Wally (Dec 14, 2015)

Ryan-James said:


> x 2, we grew up watching Les Hiddin, Alby Mangle, Malcom Douglas, Leyland brothers and of course the barefoot bushman Harry Butler.
> Such a shame, he had done great things as a naturalist.
> 
> Old Bear Grylls has nothing on these guys regardless of how much urine he drink in one sitting.



I'm going to suggest Bear Grylls has Alby Mangle covered by a country mile. I personally wouldn't have uttered his name in the presence of the others you mentioned.

Harry Butler, rest in peace old chap.


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## cement (Dec 14, 2015)

Was harry called the bare foot bushman? 
As far as I know Rob is alive and well.


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## kingofnobbys (Dec 14, 2015)

IMO Butler was the pick of them , he real no BS and interested in concervation and education ONLY.

I've met Mal and family .... he's a very nice bloke and has some very funny stories. It's a shame Mike and Mal split as a team.


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## adderboy (Dec 15, 2015)

By coincidence, I purchased the entire set of "In the Wild with Harry Butler" on DVD earlier this year. (I knew Harry was sick, but I didn't know how sick.) The episodes I have seen so far remind me of just how good he was. A very smart man, knew his stuff, and didn't bother too much with stardom. And an inspiration to many, many people.

S


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## pythoninfinite (Dec 16, 2015)

There's an interesting contrast in actions and image with lots of these "wildlife legends." I knew Harry very well in the 50s, 60s and 70s, firstly when I was a member of the WA Naturalists Club as a schoolkid, and then while I was working at the WA Museum. Harry was a great advocate for our wildlife and certainly did much on the public stage to foster a better community understanding of our natural heritage. On the other side of the coin, while working as a contract collector for the WA Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (in WA), he would come back to Perth with literally thousands of dead specimens of all sorts of species - one species in particular, the Wyulda or Scaly-tailed Possum was thought to be extinct, but Harry found a population of them near Kalumbaru, and brought dozens of dead specimens of this species back with him. Wholesale killing in the name of "science" was the way it went in those days, and a dead specimen as proof of existence was regarded as absolutely necessary. There was/is a certain amount of ego involved in having your name on as many collectors tags in a collection as well. I'm not sure whether, these days, with DNA sampling becoming increasingly sophisticated, whether this mentality still exists within the museum community (maybe a scale clip and release would suffice these days?), but there was definitely a yawning gap between public persona and private activity.

Whilst I lament Harry's death, especially because it represents the end of an era that was very significant in the development of my interests and attitudes (he was certainly my ultra-hero when I was a schoolkid!), if I look at these things objectively today, it's hard not to be a bit cynical when I have witnessed truckloads of plastic drums full of thousands of formalin-fixed dead specimens being unloaded at the museum loading dock after each expedition. I hope it's not so rampant these days.


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## Waterrat (Dec 16, 2015)

How interesting Jamie, it's the sort of stuff the general public doesn't get to know about. Unfortunately, the museum collector's mentality and actions still goes on. I could name two Qld scientists, one responsible for the extinction of once a very unique and rare frog species and the other one collected thousands of frogs (voucher specimens) annually in NQ during his career. Both are retired now but I wonder what their successors are up to. You don't get to know these facts unless you're an insider.

cheers
Michael


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## Fay (Dec 16, 2015)

You bring back heaps of dead specimens of something thought to be 'extinct'.....sounds pretty sensible to me :shock:


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## Waterrat (Dec 16, 2015)

Fay said:


> You bring back heaps of dead specimens of something thought to be 'extinct'.....sounds pretty sensible to me :shock:



If you read my post properly Fay, it will make sense. He collected the frogs BEFORE they became extinct. His unnecessary and over the top collecting most probably contributed to the SUBSEQUENT extinction of the species. It wasn't thought to be extinct at the time of his collections.


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## Fay (Dec 16, 2015)

Was commenting on Jamie's post.



Waterrat said:


> If you read my post properly Fay, it will make sense. He collected the frogs BEFORE they became extinct. His unnecessary and over the top collecting most probably contributed to the SUBSEQUENT extinction of the species. It wasn't thought to be extinct at the time of his collections.


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## Newts (Dec 17, 2015)

Whole-specimen collecting still does occur in Australian museums but is much more conservative than in the past. While DNA samples are frequently collected by non-lethal methods, collecting specimens is important for many reasons: analysis of diet through stomach contents, studies of morphological adaptations, and taxonomy studies including new species determination, to name a few. I often see the complaint of new species being based too heavily on genetic differences. That's a whole other discussion, but I want to make the point that having whole specimens in museum collections is incredibly valuable in the description of new species when it comes to the morphological aspects.

I'm really not trying to put anyone down here or anything, just I know that museum specimen collecting is often misunderstood and viewed negatively in the public eye and it's a discussion I always want to contribute to. Museum collectors certainly never cause the extinction of a species. If collecting specimens for Australian museums coincided with a species extinction, that species was already not viable. I know wildlife is already under enough pressure from so many different sources, and that people are rightfully concerned by that. But specimen collecting, for the few individuals it removes (at least in modern times), is so worthwhile and important for our understanding and conservation of Australian wildlife.


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## Waterrat (Dec 17, 2015)

I totally agree with you Newts and it's good to hear that the collected samples decreased in recent years. I dare to say it's often the mentality of the collector (individual) rather than of the Museum and it would be good to see some rules in place as to how many voucher specimens are really needed and some control over how many are being collected. JMO

Michael


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## butters (Dec 17, 2015)

Harry was a living legend and will continue to be a legend. Like many others he was an idol growing up. I have most of his books and remember lining up to get them signed as a kid.
There isn't too many these days I could compare to some of the people listed in earlier posts. These days it's all about showmanship and wow factor, bugger all education value these days.
Sorry but Alby was an adventurous tool. He's not in the same class.


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## pythoninfinite (Dec 18, 2015)

Newts said:


> Whole-specimen collecting still does occur in Australian museums but is much more conservative than in the past. While DNA samples are frequently collected by non-lethal methods, collecting specimens is important for many reasons: analysis of diet through stomach contents, studies of morphological adaptations, and taxonomy studies including new species determination, to name a few. I often see the complaint of new species being based too heavily on genetic differences. That's a whole other discussion, but I want to make the point that having whole specimens in museum collections is incredibly valuable in the description of new species when it comes to the morphological aspects.
> 
> I'm really not trying to put anyone down here or anything, just I know that museum specimen collecting is often misunderstood and viewed negatively in the public eye and it's a discussion I always want to contribute to. Museum collectors certainly never cause the extinction of a species. If collecting specimens for Australian museums coincided with a species extinction, that species was already not viable. I know wildlife is already under enough pressure from so many different sources, and that people are rightfully concerned by that. But specimen collecting, for the few individuals it removes (at least in modern times), is so worthwhile and important for our understanding and conservation of Australian wildlife.



My post is a bit off original topic, and no reflection on Harry's activities is intended. This is an interesting conversation Newts, and whilst I agree to you to some extent, I think a lot of what goes on in Museums and other institutions (particularly involved in the more modern approaches to taxonomy) is simply a construct of human curiosity - we do it because we can, and it is driven more by advances in gene technology than any altruistic attitude to the bigger conservation picture. It keeps people with very narrow fields of expertise employed. I was a museum "insider" for 30+ years, and I have to say that I don't think I've seen one instance where specific knowledge of genetic minutiae has been a contributor to "saving a species," when all we need to know is that conserving the HABITAT is singularly the most important factor in saving anything. But governments and big miners in most parts of the world still come up with excuses as to why it's important that they do what they "must" do, and bugger the consequences for the species at risk. And of course the big miners often fund "research" projects and otherwise facilitate the work of museums - which are usually scratching for money from their governments. Corporate funding rarely comes without (even barely visible) strings attached.

This could be a many-branched discussion. I was familiar with many of the individuals involved in wholesale slaughter of huge numbers of vertebrates in the name of "research," much of it done brutally and devoid of any sensitivity to animal welfare. One collector "researcher" was interested in the variation of Magpies across the country from west to east. He set out every spring to traverse the country, and shoot specimens of adult birds wherever he found them. He chose spring as the best season because he could locate them from the raucous calls of the baby birds. I asked him what he did with the orphaned babies, he said he left them to die and moved on to the next nest. He did a similar thing with Corellas. This man eventually took his own life after being caught taking birds for his "research" in Queensland national parks, and being threatened with the loss of everything involved in the commission of his crimes, including his vehicle. Frankly, I wasn't sorry. I remember another instance where I came into camp to check on a couple of graduate museum employees one evening, and found that they had run out of Nembutal (the euthanasing drug of choice) so they were simply placing their reptiles in calico bags and dropping them into drums of formalin, to suffer appalling deaths over a number of hours. These are not isolated instances, and point to a "whatever it takes" mentality that was certainly pervasive in museums at the time (up until I left in 2000). 

Unfortunately. it takes a particular mentality to go out with the knowledge that you are going to collect and kill pretty much whatever you find (this was particularly true of "biological surveys" where specimens were collected as "proof"). Many of these individuals lack any sort of compassion for the creatures they are dealing with, when it gets caught up with ego and it becomes important to have as many tags with your name on them as you can in a museum collection, it does truly become a question of morality. But that's an argument for another day...

Jamie


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## Ramsayi (Dec 18, 2015)

All these replies in a thread which was intended to create a discussion about a well known personality of years gone by.A lot of us grew up watching him on TV and enjoyed his shows immensely,much more than a lot of others since him.Loved watching 'In the wild' and that is how I will remember him.

For the younger of us this is what wiki says about him.

In the Wild
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In The Wild is a popular nature television series produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1976 until 1981. It is hosted by Harry Butler, a noted Australian naturalist and environmental consultant. The show is a direct predecessor to the Steve Irwin/Crocodile Hunter hands-on style of nature television. In contrast to Irwin, Butler is always gentle and respectful in his handling of animals.

The re-runs of In The Wild continued to play into the 1990s.


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