Birdman
FOR PETER KAESTNER ’71, LIFE IS ONE GREAT ADVENTURE BY PETER KIRCHGRABER
PETER KAESTNER ’71 is a biologist at heart
and a diplomat by profession, a rare bird who has deftly woven two of his consuming passions — public service and ornithology — into a long and distinguished career at the State Department, traveling the world in the service of his country, while building an ever-growing list of more than 8,500 bird species that he has seen in the wild. In the process, he’s become one of the world’s top ten birders, and has even had a new species of bird named in his honor: Grallaria kaestneri, which he discovered in 1989. Born in Baltimore, Peter was the selfdescribed “black sheep” of a family steeped in lacrosse: His father was a Lacrosse Hall-ofFamer, and three of his brothers — Hank ’63, Reed ’66 and John ’68 — were AllAmericans. (Hank is also in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame). Peter played, too, and captained his freshman team at Cornell, but his abiding interests lay elsewhere. He was a science guy from the word “go.”
Peter credits his Friends School education with instilling habits of mind that have guided his work as a diplomat and conservationist. Early on, Peter hung around the chemistry lab after school, making himself useful while he waited to catch a ride home with his backdoor neighbor, Bliss Forbush, Jr. ’40, who chaired the Friends School Science Department. In 5th grade, he became so proficient at the “unknown chemicals” test
that Mr. Forbush kept him out of the lab when it was administered to juniors and seniors. His Middle School science teacher was another early mentor. “Mr. Bush worked hard to develop my interest in science. I still have the college ornithology textbook he gave me when I was in 7th grade: The Life of Birds. He was a fantastic example of what you want to see in a teacher.” When Peter graduated from Cornell in 1976, biology degree in hand, he considered going on for a Ph.D. in ornithology, or finding work with an international company, so he could travel the world and add to his life list. Instead, he spent two years in northeastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) as a Peace Corps volunteer, training science teachers and volunteering in the lab at the local hospital, just as the first Ebola cases were emerging. It was a pivotal experience: “In the Peace Corps, I realized that I wanted to live overseas and get paid for it, and I liked the idea of helping people. It goes back to the Quaker values of caring for others and their welfare.” Peter joined the Foreign Service in 1980, and immediately put his science background to work, negotiating the Migratory Bird Treaty, an effort to balance the interests of American recreational hunters with those of First Nations people in the Canadian Arctic, for whom hunting was a way of life. The groups had been at odds for years, their differences seemingly irreconcilable. Peter’s international reputation in the birding world gave him credibility in both camps, and helped him break the logjam. With Peter’s scientific input, the team, led by the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Molly Beatty, devised a framework to preserve wild bird populations for the use of both groups.
Since then, Peter has represented U.S. interests in India, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Colombia, Malaysia, Namibia, Guatemala, Brazil, Egypt, Afghanistan and Germany — and learned 13 new languages along the way. He credits his Friends School education with instilling habits of mind that have guided his work as a diplomat and conservationist. “They were never enumerated this way when I was at Friends, but the light went on in my brain when I saw a poster in the Upper School, listing five habits of mind that are foundational for the School: curiosity, creativity, empathy, resilience, and reflectiveness. That’s Quaker education in a nutshell, and I’m grateful to have had the experience.” FS
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