Edward Avery McIlhenny


Edward Avery McIlhenny, son of Tabasco brand pepper sauce tycoon Edmund McIlhenny, was an American businessman, explorer, bird bander and conservationist. He established a private wildlife refuge around his family estate on Avery Island and helped in preserving a large coastal marshland in Louisiana as a bird refuge. He also introduced several exotic plants into Jungle Gardens, his private wildlife garden.
McIlhenny is sometimes blamed for the introduction of exotic coypu, also known as nutria, into Louisiana where they are a major ecological problem. Although it is now known that he was neither the first to introduce their farming in the area or to release them into the wild, he was one of the first proponents of the animals' introduction and an avid self-promoter, so his tall tales soon became local legend and he has become inextricably linked with the origin of nutria in the state.

Biography

Born in 1872 at Avery Island, Louisiana, where the families of his father Edmund McIlhenny and his mother Mary Eliza Avery had lived since 1813, McIlhenny was educated privately before attending Wyman's Military Academy in Illinois and Dr. Holbrook's Military School in Sing Sing, New York. In 1892, McIlhenny enrolled at Lehigh University, where he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, but he dropped out of school to join Frederick Cook's 1894 Arctic expedition as an ornithologist. The expedition ended when their ship Miranda was wrecked off Greenland. In 1897, he financed his own Arctic expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska, where he leased an old government station, built to accommodate 100 men in an emergency and now owned by the Pacific Steam Whaling Company. During the famous rescue of a stranded Japanese whaling fleet, McIlhenny refused to house any of the rescued sailors except a few officers, including the Japanese adventurer and entrepreneur Jujiro Wada. He did provide cotton intended for taxidermic purposes for bedding.
On his return from the second Arctic expedition, he married Mary Givens Matthews, daughter of William Henry Matthews and Mary Campbell Given, on June 6, 1900, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Businessman

In 1898, Edward's elder brother John enlisted in the U.S. Army, eventually joining the Rough Riders. Edward took over the family business, McIlhenny's Son Corporation, which produced Tobasco, the hot-pepper sauce invented by his father some 30 years previously. Edward renamed the firm McIlhenny Company and began to expand, modernize, and standardized sauce production. He also experimented with new ways of promoting the world-famous product, such as advertising on radio.
In 1927, McIlhenny replaced the cork-topped Tabasco bottles used for nearly six decades with the now-ubiquitous screw-top bottle. He also redesigned the iconic Tabasco diamond logo trademark, largely creating the version known today.
In 1939, McIlhenny and the governor of Louisiana Richard Leche were sued for transgressions in the issue of a contract to McIlhenny for the landscaping of Louisiana State University campus. An amount of $27,351.01 was claimed but nobody was convicted after the Supreme Court held that special skills did not require competitive bidding and that services worth that amount had been delivered.

Nutria farming and release

In a venture unrelated to Tabasco sauce, McIlhenny also operated a nutria farm on Avery Island from 1938 until his death. The nutria introduction began in collaboration with Armand P. Daspit, director of the Louisiana Department of Conservation's Fur and Wild Life Division who approached McIlhenny after reading a bulletin on them from Buenos Aires. Another couple, Susan and Captain H. Conrad Brote began a nutria farm at St. Tammany Parish from around 1933. The captain served on merchant ships running between New Orleans and Buenos Aires. Their farm did well but there were no sales and they let out their nutria even before McIlhenny had begun his operations from locally acquired stock. Another nutria farm was also begun around the same time in St. Bernard Parish from where McIlhenny's first nutria were obtained in 1938. McIlhenny's nutria farm quickly grew too large for their one-acre pen and he was surprised both by their prolific breeding and the difficulties in confining them to their pens. On June 1, 1940, he freed about 20 nutria. In 1945, he released all his nutria, claiming that it would help establish a fur industry in Louisiana. At the time, state and federal agencies advocated these releases. They believed nutria would provide a profitable new fur resource and help manage the spread of overly abundant plants such as water hyacinth and alligator weed.
After these releases, the feral population became unmanageable, and its overwhelmingly harmful impact on Louisiana's wetlands became apparent. Nutria feed on vegetation that is crucial to sustaining Louisiana's coastline and protecting the state's sugarcane and rice fields. By 1960, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries estimated the nutria population along coastal regions to exceed 20 million. The U.S. Department of the Interior estimates that of Louisiana's coastal wetlands are occupied by nutria.

Conservation

After the first Arctic expedition, he noticed on returning to Avery Island, a great decline in the number of egrets. This led him to conduct experiments in captive breeding. McIlhenny founded the Bird City wildfowl refuge on Avery Island around 1895, which helped to save the snowy egret from extinction. In 1910, McIlhenny and Charles Willis Ward bought of marshland and later an additional ; on November 4, 1911, they dedicated the marsh to the state of Louisiana as a wildlife refuge. McIlhenny persuaded Mrs Russell Sage to purchase of Marsh Island on July 22, 1912, and the Rockefeller Foundation to acquire an additional nearby. This created a bird reserve of about.
McIlhenny was keen to study the birds on his estate and began bird ringing in 1912, initially using his own bands made of tin and lead on ducks, but he received few recoveries. In February 1916, he began to use bands issued by the American Bird Banding Association. Over 22 years, he banded more than 189,298 birds. Based on his ringing studies he came to the conclusion that sex-ratios in ducks were skewed in the wild with males surviving to a greater age than females. Later studies based on McIlhenny's ringing data have yielded considerable information on the movements of black vultures.
In 1941, he wrote on the potential extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, noting its presence in his estate on Avery Island and suggesting that the destruction of old growth forests was key to its demise. The subspecies of white-tailed deer on Avery Island was named after McIlhenny as Odocoileus virginianus mcilhennyi by Frederic W. Miller in 1928.
McIlhenny used his personal estate, known as Jungle Gardens, to propagate both Louisiana-native and imported plant varieties, including azaleas, irises, camellias, papyrus, and bamboo. He wrote numerous academic articles, mainly about birds and reptiles, oversaw the publication in English of two European botanical treatises, and edited Charles L. Jordan's unfinished manuscript The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting. He supported the equality of women but suggested that there were evolutionary handicaps standing in the way. He also wrote books about alligators, egrets, and African-American gospel music, including:
's Jungle Gardens, the former personal estate of Edward Avery McIlhenny.
McIlhenny died in 1949, three years after suffering a debilitating stroke; he is buried on Avery Island. Today, Jungle Gardens and Bird City continue to serve as havens for bird and plant species; they are also popular tourist destinations. Furthermore, the nearly of coastal marshland he helped to set aside as wildfowl refuges continue to exist as state wildlife areas. McIlhenny's illustrated and written documentation of plant and animal life on Avery Island was donated as a collection to Louisiana State University. The E. A. McIlhenny Collection of natural history books at Louisiana State University is named in his honor.