The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

M A R C H 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 71 William Belton , 95, a retired FSO and accomplished ornithologist, died on Oct. 25 at his home in Great Ca- capon, W. Va., from congestive heart failure. Mr. Belton was born in Portland, Ore., and graduated from Stanford University in 1935. He joined the For- eign Service in 1938 and, during a 32- year career, served in Cuba, the Do- minican Republic, Canada, Chile, Aus- tralia, Panama and Brazil. Among other positions in Washing- ton, D.C., he served as the officer in charge of Mexican affairs, deputy di- rector of the Office of South American Affairs and deputy Foreign Service in- spector for missions in 12 North Afri- can, European and Middle Eastern countries. In 1958, Mr. Belton was detailed to the National War College. Five years later, he was assigned as political ad- viser to the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, with the rank of minister. He then served as deputy chief of mission in Santiago and Canberra, retiring in 1970 as DCM in Rio de Janeiro. In retirement, Mr. Belton turned his hobby of birdwatching into a more than 30-year second career, becoming an internationally recognized ornithol- ogist. He was responsible — almost singlehandedly— for the current body of knowledge regarding the bird life of southern Brazil. Completely self-taught, Mr. Belton traveled during the 1970s in a Jeep with a small house trailer attached, tak- ing notes that he developed into a two- volume report, Birds of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (1984). Carrying a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder and direc- tional microphone, he made field recordings over a period of 20 years of more than 1,000 birds, mostly in Rio Grande do Sul. These are now housed in the Macaulay Library at Cornell University’s ornithology lab. Mr. Belton’s work was particularly noteworthy for its methodical ap- proach, its comprehensiveness and the sheer length of time he devoted to it, his associates told the New York Times . Each recording was the product of hours of standing stock-still in the wild at dawn, with swarms of biting insects for company. But over the years, Mr. Belton captured many bird songs that had never before been documented. Besides his own book, which re- mains a standard text, he prepared a pocket-size Portuguese-language ver- sion with 100 color photos, Aves Sil- vestres do Rio Grande do Sul , which is in its fourth printing. He also translated the foundational Ornitologia Brasileira , by ornithologist Helmut Sick, fromPor- tuguese into English ( Birds in Brazil , Princeton University Press, 1993). The American Bird Conservancy, which Mr. Belton helped found, has named its grants program in his honor. Mr. Belton’s first wife, the former Julia Hyslop, whom he married in 1939, died in 2003. He is survived by his second wife, Cornelia Brouwer Lett Belton of Great Cacapon, W. Va.; three children from his first marriage, Barbara Yngvesson of Amherst, Mass., Hugh Belton of McLean, Va., and Timothy Belton of Sheridan, Wyo.; eight grandchildren; and a great- grandchild. Helen B. Eilts , 87, wife of the late FSO Hermann Frederick Eilts, died on Nov. 23 in Benton, Kan., following a long illness. Mrs. Eilts was born in New York City, N.Y., on Nov. 20, 1922, the daugh- ter of Josephine (Freund) Richards and stepdaughter of Theodore Richards. She was a 1944 graduate of Wellesley College and received a master’s degree in 1947 from The Johns Hopkins Uni- I N M EMORY