Obituaries [Sept 09]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2009:
Danny Bampton, 9, of St. Charles County, Missouri, was
killed on August 19, 2009 when hit by a car. “Investigators say the
boy was riding with his mother when he saw an injured duck in the
road and asked her whether he could save it. After she pulled the
car over, Danny hopped out and put the duck in a roadside culvert on
the south side of the highway. When he tried to cross back over the
rural, two-lane road to his family’s car, Danny was struck by a
westbound Subaru Legacy driven by Alayna R. Hitz, 18, of
Wentzville. He died at the scene,” wrote Joel Currier of the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch. ANIMAL PEOPLE reminds readers that the safe way
to rescue animals from roadways is from the side of the road that the
animals are on, using one’s vehicle to block traffic, with four-way
flashers on.

Alister Rodgers, 55, a veterinarian in Queensland,
Australia, died on September 1, 2009 after two weeks in a coma.
Rodgers and two employees of a stud horse farm at Cawarral near
Rockhampton contracted Hendra virus from a horse who died of the
virus on July 28. The cause of the horse’s death was confirmed on
August 10, three days after federal budget cuts forced the closure
of the Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre for
Emerging Infectious Disease, the main institution researching Hendra
virus. Rodgers was the seventh human to become infected with Hendra
virus since 1994, and the fourth to die from it.

Henry Sheldon Fitch, 99, died on September 8, 2009 in
Stillwater, Oklahoma. From 1948 until 2006 Fitch was resident
naturalist at the Kansas University Natural History Reservation,
eventually renamed the Fitch Natural History Reservation in his
honor. “It is not an exaggeration to say that Fitch was the father
of snake biology,” said Cornell University professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology Harry Greene. Green was the 2004 recipient of
the Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology, presented by
the American Society of Ichthyologists & Herpetologists for
outstanding field work.