The Long, Exceptional Life of Frank Graham

Scrambling with my team to close Audubon’s March-April 2008 issue, we hit a wall. In the dusk of publishing’s golden age, advertising was so strong that we had depleted our entire inventory of articles. I reached out to Audubon’s go-to guy, Frank Graham Jr., because I knew I could always count on him, and because the issue happened to mark the 40^th anniversary of his tenure as a field editor. I asked him if he had a favorite piece we could cull from our archives.

The story he chose had humble origins. Les Line, Audubon’s earlier editor, and his wife, Lois, were spending several days in Milbridge, a small lobster town in northern Maine and home to Frank and his wife, Ada. They lived in a beautiful house built in 1812 on a high hill above a bay, with 20 acres of woods, wildflowers, and a big pond. One day the four of them were enjoying a lobster dinner, but the entire time they were socked in by dense fog. Line tossed out the idea to Frank to write a feature on fog. 

“What he did was take something ordinary—fog—an event we experience but never really think about except perhaps as a nuisance, and turn it into an essay that mixes history, science, literature, and a Mainer’s personal experience into a memorable, eminently readable whole,” Line told me while we were laying out the story for the issue. “It’s indeed a masterpiece.” (You can read it here.)

Frank passed away in late May soon after reaching his centennial, a remarkable milestone capstoning a life jam packed with them. The number of places and people he touched along the way is simply astounding. So as 2025 draws to a close, it seems a fitting time to reflect back on the lasting legacy of Frank’s life and work.

I can think of few American writers who contributed so much to a magazine for so long as he did. Frank’s first assignment for Audubon—a two-part series exploring pesticide regulation in the wake of Rachel Carson's death—prompted Line to appoint him to the role of field editor in 1968, a position he held until 2013. “It was one of the smartest moves I made in my 25 years as editor,” Line told me in 2008. “I truly believe he’s been part of a team that has been contributing the best environmental reporting and natural history writing you can find in any magazine in America.”

Frank excelled at both. His interests extended from tiny flies to giant conservation figures such as Archie Carr. And his prolific writing on birds stands out as some of the finest in the magazine’s 127-year history, showing a deep appreciation for detail and keen sensitivity for their welfare. “The good life cannot be bought at the expense of humanity’s ties to the natural processes,” he wrote, distilling Audubon’s mission since its founding. “What’s bad for birds is usually awful for human beings.”

Among the many extraordinary writers in the magazine—including luminaries such as Edward Abbey, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, and Wendell Berry—his work stood out to Kenn Kaufman, as it did to me, when we were young boys. “I joined Audubon at the age of nine, in the mid 1960s, about the time Frank started writing for the magazine,” says Kaufman, who later assumed the roles of Audubon field editor and accomplished author himself. “I soon learned to watch for his byline. Whether he was celebrating nature or reporting on a grim environmental issue, he wrote with such clarity that I read his articles over and over, trying to see how he achieved his effects. Frank was a major influence on me when I was developing my own writing style.”  

During his 45 years as field editor, Frank crisscrossed the country visiting far-flung places to report on bird life and sound a clarion call to protect it. (By the end of his career, he estimated that he had taken 200 reporting trips!) Frank once singlehandedly wrote almost an entire 236-page issue, a 30,000-word magnum opus devoted to a history of and a salute to Audubon’s expansive sanctuary system.

Frank knew it well. For one of the first assignments I gave him, I sent him to document the plight of the Roseate Spoonbill, precariously residing between the southern Everglades and the Florida Keys after human development threatened the species’ rebound from overhunting. In the mangrove forest, Frank watched two mature spoonbills “as they flew with their deep, slow wingbeats, their long necks and curious bills pointed north toward their feeding grounds in the Everglades.”

The spoonbill served as a prime example of an indicator species, mirroring the health of its habitat for both humans and wildlife, and Frank’s writing balanced the ineffable splendor of Florida’s “flame bird” against its dire prospects. “Their beauty, he wrote, “may be the best argument for fixing the system.” Frank also precisely captured the experience of navigating their world, which involved trudging through “knee deep marl the consistency of oatmeal.”  

Jerry Lorenz, who led Audubon’s research in Florida Bay, served as Frank’s guide to the ecosystem. “As I reflect on the week or so I spent with Frank while he worked on that story I think of a quiet, humble, delightful, and self-deprecating man whose mild manner hid encyclopedic knowledge and foresight about the natural world. But most of all,” he says, “I remember his indefatigable nature.” Lorenz had tried to discourage Frank, at 75 then twice Lorenz’s age, from visiting a spoonbill colony on an exceptionally inhospitable island. “He made me look silly while keeping that gentle, funny, and incisive demeanor for the almost two hours we mucked through that swamp looking for and counting spoonbill nests,” Lorenz says. “It didn’t surprise me he lived to be 100.” 

For another assignment, Frank ventured to Nebraska’s Platte River to capture the majesty of one of the bird world’s grandest spectacles: the convergence of half a million Sandhill Cranes during their formidable northward migration. At Audubon’s 1,248-acre Lillian Annette Rowe Bird Sanctuary, he peered with two dozen other watchers through small openings in a long bird blind on the shore of the Platte River.

“The long-necked cranes sailed on broad wings against a sky whose gathering darkness was slashed in the west by a garish wedge of sunset,” Frank wrote. “Slowing and descending now on wings arced tentlike over their bodies—dumping the wind from their wings as it were—the cranes wobbled in the air once or twice and, in a volley of piercing, rattling calls, dropped into a wet meadow within sight of the bind. One of the grandest cyclic phenomena on our continent was at full tide.”

Hope sprang eternal in much of Frank’s conservation coverage, whether in the resilience of birds like the Sandhill Crane or the fortitude of people determined to help them thrive. His talent for rendering human nature shined brightly in conservation stories that brought his central subjects to life through their words and deeds. A masterful profile writer, in the 1980s Line dispatched him to paint memorable portraits of the biggest figures in the movement such as Carr, Mardy Murie, and David Brower that still stand the test of time.

No Audubon writer showed more sympathy for the unsung heroes at the bottom of the food chain, either. Three of Frank’s passions were plants, spiders, and flies. During one of many summer visits with my family to his home, we walked at low tide to the island a couple of hundred feet from his shore to munch on fireweed, a coastal plant whose flowers and leaves make a delicious salad. Who knew? Frank did.

He also identified the different spiders climbing in and out of his kayaks. His upstairs office contained jars filled with them. Frank was very proud of his co-authorship of a 2007 scientific paper about the many spider species found in his hometown for a journal published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and he mailed me a copy. He partly credited Silent Spring for lighting that spark: “Carson made plain the bright side of insect life, the ecology of life in the wild, the interactions among the myriad invertebrates around us.”

Leave it to Audubon’s very own entomologist to perform the miracle of casting misunderstood insects, bearers of malaria and other maladies, as gorgeous, sympathetic, and critical creatures. “Hoverflies are gemlike insects garbed in velvety reds and blacks and golds, rivaling hummingbirds and butterflies in bring to vivid life the masses of plants in bloom,” he wrote. The spry 82-year-old had joined 42 professional entomologists and amateurs, including an Iraq war vet, for a “Diptera Blitz” on a summer Saturday afternoon in Acadia National Park. They were conducting a 24-hour “intensive yet inexpensive” survey of Diptera, or two-winged flies. Trudging through marsh, bog, and forest, Audubon’s bio-blitzer more than pulled his own weight, helping to identify many of the 260 species in the park.

An English major at Columbia, publicity director for the Brooklyn Dodgers (including during their only championship season in 1955), and a former successful sportswriter with no scientific training, Frank a was self-taught naturalist—straight out of the 19^th century, he joked. Few people know, owing to Frank’s humility, that he served in the U.S. Navy for three years during World War II aboard the escort aircraft carrier Marcus Island as a torpedoman’s mate. He saw action throughout the Pacific, fighting in the bloody Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, where, as he shared with me, he witnessed in abject horror kamikaze planes sinking nearby American ships. His broken glasses early on did not prevent him from reading his own ship's entire library.

Growing up in suburban New York City, Frank was always fascinated by nature, and he spent as much time as he could reveling in it. He dated his love of birds to a backyard bird book gifted to him when he was 5 or 6. He looked out a window and saw in a bush a black bird with red wing patches matching one of the pictures—a Red-winged Blackbird. “I had identified a bird on my own and accumulated the first of untold memories concerning the ‘otherness’ of living things around me,” he subsequently wrote. “I had become a birdwatcher.”

Frank became a formidable conservationist as well. After Carson died, someone had to step up to the plate to defend her from the scathing attacks, often personal, launched by a rogue’s gallery of chemical companies, agribusiness flacks, and pest control workers. Frank went to bat for Carson, first in his reporting for Audubon in the 1960s, and then in the book Since Silent Spring, which became an instant classic. It appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 and was translated into multiple languages.

In 1990, A.A. Knopf published The Audubon Ark, Frank’s seminal history of the society. The book, which he also expanded from a magazine feature, remains a bible for anyone associated with the venerable organization. It covers in rich detail Audubon’s conservation successes, from stopping the plume trade in the early 1900s to the California Condor’s recovery from an innovative captive breeding program in the later part of the century.  It represents an amazing feat of reporting and research, for which Frank conducted hundreds of interviews and combed through essential documents widely scattered up and down the East Coast.

Frank was a walking encyclopedia on Audubon’s living history, too. On many of his visits to sanctuaries and other Audubon outposts, Frank was accompanied by Ada, and their subjects were invariably delighted by the dynamic duo’s high spirits and radiant charm. Throughout Audubon, all you had to say was “Frank and Ada” and everyone knew who you were referring to. They were married for 73 happy years.

Together the team wrote 10 children’s books under the Audubon imprint during the late 1970s. Meanwhile, the new Audubon Adventures, a colorful newspaper about birds and bird conservation, was sent to classrooms across the country. Largely developed and written by Ada, Audubon Adventures reached a quarter million children within five years.

On top of his outstanding work as field editor, Frank wrote 30 books. In addition to The Audubon Ark and Since Silent Spring, at least two others are still classics: Man’s Dominion: The Story of Conservation in America and Gulls: A Social History.

To be a conservationist of this centurion’s magnitude for so long requires as much heart as it does head. “I think one of [Rachel] Carson’s legacies to the future is the recognition that it is better to come to conservation through love, rather than fear,” Frank wrote in 2012 in one of his final pieces. Perhaps the highest honor to pay him would be to rank him as Carson’s worthy successor in environmental journalism.  They both imbued their lives and work with a fearlessness in the face of a tough fight and an abiding love of nature.

David Seideman was Audubon’s editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2013.