THE OLDEST cardinal, based on bird records, lived 14 years. They typically live about 2 to 2 1/2 years.

Hervey Brackbill, a nationally known ornithologist, banded a cardinal in Woodlawn in 1982 and it came back to his feeder for at least 11 years and mated yearly, possibly with the same bird which had lost its bands.

Cardinals, he noted, were always trying to pull the bands off.

Mr. Brackbill was among the first in Baltimore to observe the arrival of the house finch birds that had previously come no closer than Western Nebraska.

Some New York pet stores in 1952 were found in illegal possession of some pairs of these western songbirds so store owners turned them loose. Their offspring are believed to have come here.

Bird columnist

Mr. Brackbill, a retired Sunday Sun editor who recently died at age 97, wrote a luminous column about birds for The Evening Sun editorial page for 25 years.

His column first appeared in 1936 when he began casually watching birds on Sunday strolls near Lake Ashburton in West Baltimore, listing 48 types, adding:

"I still can't tell all the sparrows apart, and some of the warblers were too fast for me."

He started using opera glasses. When a neighbor mistook them for a drawn revolver she called police.

"Well, there was some excitement for a little while," he wrote. "But in the end I was put down as perfectly harmless." But he didn't write another column for two years.

Below his byline -- The Evening Sun added a light touch to its columns -- was the explanation, "Chief, Evening Sun Bird Observation Bureau." When readers called The Sun to speak to Mr. Brackbill they might say, "I can't remember his name, but it's the name of a bird."

His observations became serious studies of life histories and behavior patterns.

One that challenged him was bird anting. He had watched robins, starlings, catbirds and purple grackles pick up an ant and rub it on their plumage, but usually the underside of the wings -- this sometimes involved grotesque contortions.

He would get down on his hands and knees to retrieve the maimed or dead ants.

They were sent to an entomologist at the Bureau of Entomology in Washington for study. He wrote a 12-page paper on anting for The Auk, a scholarly journal.

Mr. Brackbill was one of many ornithologists absorbed in this unresolved behavior. He and one or two others thought anting "may be irradiation of certain fluids for the production of Vitamin D."

He also studied the "flashing" of mockingbirds zig-zagging across grass, flipping their wings, possibly to frighten insects from hiding for easier feeding. With a stopwatch he timed the repetitions and recorded this with line and bar graphs.

His daily observations were made in shorthand, later typed for subject and place and bound.

In addition to The Auk, he wrote for other scholarly journals, here and abroad, and the "Harper Encyclopedia of Science."

He also became interested in the gall wasp, an insect. When they drop their wings in late summer and fall, they are small, dark, ball-shaped.

On his knees

Mr. Brackbill would again get down on his hands and knees, searching under leaves for the pellets. Children would stand around watching.

When a small girl with her mother appeared at his home -- hands filled with her contributions -- Mr. Brackbill accepted them graciously, not telling her they were rabbit droppings.

While attending school in Pennsylvania, he began working for the Associated Press as a telegrapher, using the Morse code of dots and dashes. He was so fast that he was promoted to Baltimore to operate the "pony wire" to New York.

He joined The Evening Sun as a reporter in 1928 and became the part-time music critic. After a promotion to the copy desk, he soon became its slot man in charge of editing stories.

Mr. Brackbill -- known to all as Brack -- joined The Sunday Sun in 1946. He was book editor and later assistant magazine editor, editing its stories. He was a meticulous, superb editor. Even this was acknowledged by the writers whose stories he corrected, tightened and refined -- a compliment, indeed.

While editing stories, the fingers of his left hand drummed an agitated tattoo. Writers speculated that they were pulsations of the Morse code and wondered what the words might be.

Apocryphal story:

An old telegrapher visiting the office stood transfixed in front of Mr. Brackbill's desk absorbing the fingers almost instantaneously tapping dots and dashes.

"I've never heard words like that," he is supposed to have said, "ever transmitted over the wire."

Harold A. Williams is a retired editor of The Sunday Sun and author of "The Sun, 1937-1987," published on The Sun's 150th anniversary.

Pub Date: 3/22/99