Always a nature lover, Donald Manning, when he was
about six years old, climbed a barbed wire fence, the
better to peek into a bluebird's nest. When the wire
snapped and Donald dropped, a barb sliced the skin
over his breastbone so deeply that some six decades
later physicians spying the scar were confident he had
undergone heart surgery in years past.
But it was Donald's mother, on a different day, who
might have had a scare of the heart stopping variety
when, reclining on the daybed, she looked up to see a
hognose snake peering at her through lace curtains.
Donald had thought it best not to mention the snake
had gotten loose in the house.
At some point in time, he says with a
still-mischievous grin, "she laid rules down about
what I could and couldn't bring in the house."
While Donald was born in New Hampshire, the fear of
German U-boats and wartime invasion at the start of
World War II had brought his parents, Frank and
Maybelle, to McKenzie, nearer her hometown of Camden.
"They thought this was far enough to the center of the
country," Donald explains.
His parents ran the Gulf Station and Greyhound Bus
stop on Main Street, downtown, during the days when
Highway 79 ran through the heart of the city. From the
intersection at Highland and Cedar, which at the time
dead-ended at a field where Save-A-Lot and other
stores are now located, the highway turned right into
town, then banked left at the city square and headed
on to Trezevant.
The Mannings also owned a poultry farm with 20,000
laying hens. "We sold eggs all over," says Donald,
whose job on the farm, put mildly, was 'shoveling.'
In school he was active in football and scouting,
achieving the rank of Eagle Scout with palms and
serving as a nature counselor over two summers at Camp
Mack Morris in Camden, when he was around the age of
fifteen or sixteen.
He was at the camp one sunny day when he noticed
campers balancing a copperhead snake on two sticks.
"I thought it was a real good time to give them a
lecture on handling snakes," says Donald. The lecture
turned into a first aid demonstration, however, when,
holding the snake by the neck as he spoke, he was bit
on the thumb.
The experience didn't faze Donald, who nowadays comes
home with snakes in pillowcases, rescued from the
road, and releases them on the Manning farm located
between Macedonia and Henry. Says his wife, Nancy, a
registered nurse who shrugs off his exploits with a
smile, "I'm used to it; I like the nature thing, too."
Nancy and Donald
Manning at home.
The Mannings' love for animals is evident upon
visiting their charming "sharecropper's shack" built
of a variety of woods like pine, poplar and fir with
thick oak counter tops. Among framed photos hanging on
natural walls are the couple's prize winning walking
horses, including Gen-N-Tonic, ridden by trainer Jason
Freeman. The couple keeps four pleasure horses at home
and three in training in Seymour, Tennessee.
"I've always loved horses," says Nancy, whose passion
was whetted when she first moved from Illinois to
McKenzie. She lived on Dr. J.T. Holmes' farm, from
whom she obtained Patty, her first walking horse, as
well as her first cow that she kept for 27 years. She
had started feeding the blind cow from a bucket when
the other cows would not allow it to eat. Over time,
the cow provided Nancy with 13 of its offspring and
today the Manning farm retains two pet bulls of the
mixed charolais and santa gertrudis breeds.
Donald's interest in snakes is a sideline of other
naturalist pursuits of the self-taught malacologist
and ornithologist, words that define his expertise in
the study of mussels (a type of bivalve shellfish) and
birds.
He was first exposed to freshwater mussels through his
uncle, T.J. Whitfield, who was a commercial musseler
in Donald's youth. In fact, Donald shares, it is
Whitfield's boat that is on display at the Tennessee
River Folklife Center atop Pilot Knob in Nathan
Bedford Forrest State Park in Eva, near Camden. Filled
with interesting displays about the mussel industry -
with examples of pearl buttons stamped from shells and
freshwater pearl jewelry as well as cultural exhibits
- the nearby attraction is well worth the drive.
When Donald graduated from high school in 1954, he
ricocheted between college and jobs, attending Bethel
College and the University of Tennessee at Martin
before, many years later, finally graduating from
Murray State University, where he also accomplished
hours toward his master's degree.
His only sibling, Frank, Jr., an Air Force pilot, was
killed in 1955 in Dennison, Texas after ejecting from
his plane while on his final qualification flight for
the F-86D aircraft.
Donald moved to Flint, Michigan where he worked for
General Motors building '55 Chevy trucks, working two
shifts, for six months. He then came back to Tennessee
where he worked at the Milan Arsenal, starting on the
production line and ending in the instrument lab with
14 people under his supervision.
"I was always interested in something else," says
Donald, explaining unapologetically his shifts from
school to jobs and back. He even ran for state
legislature after becoming interested in politics
while working with Winfield Dunn's 1970 gubernatorial
campaign.
Manning lost, but grins upon recalling that he carried
Madison County and forced perhaps the "biggest
turn-out Carroll County ever had."
Until recently, however, he never worked in his
lifelong interest of biology. He worked at the
McKenzie concrete block plant and later opened another
concrete block plant in Bells, interspersed with jobs
for Tamco in McKenzie, serving, for example, as
project manager over the building of the new post
office which he characterized as "a tough job."
"I get bored doing anything for long," he reiterates.
He retired as vice president of the SACO corporation
that was located in McKenzie.
"Somewhere in between there I got my degree," says
Donald.
He also had children Kendra (Grant), who now resides
in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Brant, who lives
locally.
Donald's fascination with malacology took root while
helping Brant with a Cub Scout nature project,
identifying leaves and flowers. He wanted to take the
project a step further by collecting and identifying
mussels, thinking he would pick up a "Peterson Field
Guide" to assist in the endeavor. Unfortunately, the
popular series of nature guides stopped short of
mussels.
"There is no Peterson Field Guide for mussels," he
jokes today, allowing that mussels are "extremely
difficult to identify; there's so much variation
(among species) and they look so much alike."
He set out to teach himself about the creatures in the
days before Internet research, starting with published
studies from which he gleaned additional resources and
contacts.
These days, he's a well-known expert in the field. "If
you're involved in mussels, you know me," he smiles
unassumingly. He has added about six previously
unknown species to Tennessee's list of mussel species
and has collections in the museums of comparative
zoology at Harvard and Ohio State University.
He explains the collections allow those reading
scientific publications of his work 20 years later to
know "what the heck I was talking about."
While China has "a lot of mussels," the bulk of them
are found in North America, Donald says, noting as
well that there are probably more specimens in the
drainage areas of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers
than anywhere else, including the Ozarks, which comes
close.
It's hands on work to scout for mussels, a job that
typically finds Donald on his knees in muddy waters,
feeling for the shells through the silt.
"And you run across cotton mouths while you're doing
this," says Nancy, who says her husband talks to the
snakes he encounters. "He talks to everything," she
declares, citing the ease with which he establishes
rapport with wild animals such as deer that venture
into their yard.
"The idea is to ease around them while you're
talking," Donald explains, laughing. He recalls
musseling trips where more caution was warranted when
it was alligators, rather than snakes, that might lurk
nearby.
Donald recently completed a six-week venture as a
consultant for the Army Corps of Engineers project at
Chickamauga Reservoir on the Tennessee River just
north of Chattanooga, identifying and relocating some
43,000 mussels prior to the construction of a
navigation lock in the dam, including three endangered
species.
Concerning mussels, Donald says, "They're fascinating
little animals."
Indeed the stationary creatures have an intriguing
life cycle, luring fish through the deceptive art of
nature to strike at what appears to be tiny fish or
worms, depending upon species, and are actually means
for delivering parasitic mussel larvae called "glochidia",
which latch onto the gills of fishes where they mature
and eventually slough off and sink to complete their
life cycle. A truly fascinating animated display of
this process may be viewed at http://midwest.fws.gov/mussel/life_history.html.
Some mussel species are host specific, unable to
complete their life cycle without the aid of
particular breeds of fish, a fact that renders mussels
particularly vulnerable to changes in their
environment. In fact, says Donald, when the gates were
shut on the dam at Percy Priest, an entire mussel
species was wiped out.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cites, as well,
that when the construction of a lock and dam near
Keokuk, Iowa blocked the migration of the skipjack
herring up the Mississippi River, two species of
mussels formerly found in the watershed above the dam
were annihilated as the fish was their only host.
"Most mussel species are in trouble," says Donald. "A
lot are extinct already and a bunch more are going to
be. We're damming and dredging so there's no habitat
left."
One cite indicates some "43% of the 300 species of
freshwater mussels are in danger of extinction."
Native mussels are further threatened by foreign
species such as "Zebra" mussels that do not require a
fish host, instead drifting as plankton until they
become large enough to attach to the river bed or
other objects by means of "byssal threads" that
produce a glue-like substance, allowing them to attach
themselves to work and recreational riverboats by
which they are transported to new habitats.
The problem illustrates the ecological principle that
one cannot simply do "one thing"; every action taken
in an environment impacts every other process, to the
point of determining whether or not species -
including humans - might ultimately survive.
The Mannings on a
birding expedition in Belize.
In addition to being the foodstuff for mammals of
nearby forests, such as raccoons, as well as ducks and
fish, mussels filter the water, straining pollution
and other contaminants to create cleaner rivers.
Donald describes an easy experiment whereby a half
dozen mussels are added to a five-gallon bucket filled
with muddy river substrate. Within an hour, he says,
the water clears, siphoned by the mussels.
"They are one of the best indicator species," he
continues, referring to the reliability of mussels in
providing early warning of specific pollutants and the
degree of contamination in an area.
But it is this very characteristic that makes mussels
prone to the dangers of pollution, a fact that also
renders them unsuitable for human consumption in the
modern world. Conversely, one has only to navigate
original riverbanks to see old Indian "midden", piles
of mussel refuse that show the shellfish were part of
the diet of former Native American civilizations, and
where the shells of mussels now extinct may be found.
"You'd be out of your mind to eat them; they siphon up
everything," says Donald, his warning extending as
well to the ingestion of fish. He refers to warning
signs on riverbanks warning people to limit their
intake of fish and advising the young and pregnant
women to abstain from eating fish at all. In the same
area where the signs are located, he says, every
morning one can see commercial fishing vessels
unloading their catches and heading for market.
"If it's not good for you to eat the fish it's not
good for anything else that's in the river," he says,
adding, "Obviously, I'm a little bit of a veteran
environmentalist, too."
|
Manning feeds the gulls in
Florida.
|
He is also one of the foremost "birders" in the
state, though his forays into bird habitats have not
been confined to Tennessee.
"We've been to Belize four or five times," says Nancy,
describing ventures where "the only Americans we see
are at the airport." From there they rent a car and
spend their time backpacking through the forests in
search of exotic species.
A trip last May to Florida, ostensibly a bird watching
expedition, gave Donald another opportunity to rescue
a plethora of snakes from road kill catastrophe.
Among the 100 snakes removed from harm's way were
eastern diamond back rattler, eastern pygmy, a
"monster" mud snake, black snakes, grass snakes and
more.
"He had a field day," declares Nancy, rolling her eyes
good-naturedly.
The couple plans to travel to Arizona, northern
Mexico, and California on a two-week birding
expedition and visit to see Nancy's daughter, Tanya
Parish, in California, and a trip to Panama or Ecuador
is in the planning stages. Nancy's other children are
Jerry and Ted, both of whom live in Illinois.
In addition to their many naturalist pursuits, Nancy
says, "We read a lot; Donald reads all the time. And I
have eight grandchildren. He's a good grandpa to my
grandkids, teaching them all about nature. They like
to go fishing; go out and look under every rock and
log."
