Victor Emanuel, a renowned birder whose adventures around the world in pursuit of imperial woodpeckers, red-crowned cranes and other avian wonders were chronicled by George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and Rose Styron, died on March 11 in Austin, Texas. He was 84.
The cause of his death, in a senior living facility, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his nephew, Steven Emanuel, said.
Mr. Emanuel made a business out of his reverential regard for birds when he founded Victor Emanuel Nature Tours in 1976. (“When he comes to New York for a visit,” Mr. Plimpton once noted in Audubon magazine, “he arrives at our apartment with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck.”)
Among the first to specialize in ecotourism, his company, based in Austin, employs dozens of guides who lead hundreds of expeditions a year. In addition to writers, Mr. Emanuel’s bird-watching companions included Prince Philip, the filmmaker Terrence Malick, and former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, who was a promoter of conservation efforts in Texas.
The Bushes once invited Mr. Emanuel to their sprawling ranch in Crawford.
“You ought to go down and look at the birds,” Mr. Emanuel told Mr. Bush, according to Texas Monthly.
“I’m a bird shooter,” Mr. Bush replied. “That’s all I’ve done as a kid — you know, I shoot ’em.”
Mr. Bush thought about it. He was intrigued.
“So I went birding with Victor Emanuel,” he recalled, “and it was fabulous.”
Growing up in Houston, Mr. Emanuel wasn’t interested in sports or comic books; he spent his summer afternoons looking for hummingbirds and cardinals. In 1956, when he was 16, he started an annual Christmas bird count in Freeport. He kept the yearly tradition going through college and, later, while working as a political consultant.
At one of these events in 1971, Mr. Emanuel and his team of volunteers recorded 226 species — a record number for a Christmas bird count in the United States that drew the attention of editors at Audubon. The next year, the magazine sent Mr. Plimpton, who had writing been about his blundering experiences trying to play professional football and golf, to count birds with Mr. Emanuel.
“I should admit at the outset that my credentials as a bird watcher are slightly sketchy,” Mr. Plimpton’s article began.
He was spellbound by Mr. Emanuel.
“Just a flash of wing, or the mildest of sounds, and he has himself an identification,” Mr. Plimpton wrote. “He is so intense that I rarely ask questions. But he shows me things. I have gazed upon the groove-billed ani.”
Mr. Emanuel spoke to his team of birders like a college basketball coach during a timeout.
“We have a barn owl staked out,” he told them. “Keep an eye out for the screech owl. We have often missed him. There ought to be some groove-billed anis around. Can’t miss them. They have weird, comical calls and they look, when they move around, like they’re going to fall apart.”
After the trip, Mr. Plimpton introduced Mr. Emanuel to Mr. Matthiessen, the environmentalist and nature writer, and soon the trio started birding together. Mr. Matthiessen became so close with Mr. Emanuel that he eventually led tours with him. He wrote about the experiences in “The Birds of Heaven” (2001) and “End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica” (2003).
“I call him the Zen master of birds,” Mr. Matthiessen told Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine in 2009. “He’s a wonderful teacher, and he has converted a lot of people to birding.”
It took perseverance. Mr. Emanuel began offering tours as a side venture and advertising them in bird and nature magazines, but business throughout the early 1970s was slow, and he continued working for local political campaigns. In 1975, a friend at the Audubon Society hired him to lead a bird-watching trip to the Yucatán region of Mexico.
“It was at the age where these birding tours were just starting, and it just grew and grew and grew,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview with the Conservation History Association of Texas in 1997. “Then birding tours became more and more popular.”
When he quit politics to start Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, his colleagues were shocked. In his autobiography, “One More Warbler: A Life With Birds” (2017), written with S. Kirk Walsh, he recalled a story told to him by Lola Oberman, a birder and political speechwriter. At a meeting with Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s staff, Ms. Oberman mentioned that birding was a hobby of hers.
“You should meet Vic — Vic What’s-His-Name,” a staffer for Senator Bentsen told her, Mr. Emanuel wrote. “We hoped he would go into politics, but he went into birding instead, and we haven’t heard from him since. What a wasted life.”
He preferred his to theirs, though.
“I am a birder and a bird lover and a bird-watcher,” he told The Austin American-Statesman in 2016. “Watching them, we become more alert. We notice everything: the shape of clouds, a change of wind, drops of water that become more like prisms. It gives us a different life.”
In 1986, Mr. Emanuel opened a summer camp for young birders. He considered it his greatest legacy.
“If you’re the only kid in your school who likes to watch birds, you’ll lead a lonely life,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1992. He added, “I want them to have confidence in birding as a joyful and exciting sport.”
Victor Lloyd Emanuel was born on Oct. 24, 1940, in Houston. His father, Victor Emanuel Sr., was a sports editor for The Houston Post and later worked in local politics. His mother, Marian (Williams) Emanuel, was an antiques dealer and artist.
As a boy, Victor loved animals, a passion he inherited from his father, who once fought with officials at the Houston Zoo to keep admission for children free.
“He was interested in nature, but he was an urban man, so he liked animals in zoos,” Mr. Emanuel told The American-Statesman. “His favorite animals were snakes. He became a friend of the director of the snake house, who allowed us to watch the snakes be fed.”
Mr. Emanuel studied biology and political science at the University of Texas, graduating in 1963. He went on to earn a master’s degree in political science from Harvard.
No immediate family members survive.
On trips, Mr. Emanuel would often give birders nicknames, sometimes based on how their personalities resembled birds.
In her autobiography, “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart” (2023), Rose Styron noted that Mr. Matthiessen was “the curlew, because the curlew is a swift-running shorebird and Peter’s first big successful book was ‘The Shorebirds of North America.’”
She had expected to be called the Baltimore oriole, because of her birthplace.
“He said, no, you’re the scarlet tanager because like Scarlett O’Hara you always put off making decisions until tomorrow,” she wrote.
Mr. Plimpton chose his own nickname: Hadada, an ibis found in sub-Saharan Africa that, if disturbed, lets out a loud noise, defecates and then flies away.
“To George,” Mr. Emanuel wrote in his autobiography, “this series of actions was the perfect metaphor for journalists: ‘We make a lot of noise and then make a mess, and leave.’”
As for Mr. Emanuel, he was the Hooded Warbler, a gentle songbird.