“Strawberries are sacred to the Mohawks,” Ward Stone told me several years ago. “When somebody dies, they will say, ‘She is eating strawberries now,’ not that she died but that she is eating strawberries.”

Ward Stone is eating strawberries now.

I was flooded with emails from environmentalists and activists, letting me know he had died on Feb. 8.

At age 84, he still thought he had an unfinished job — to fight for the environment. Over his decades joined in that battle, he helped Mohawks discover what was polluting their water, worked to identify the West Nile virus in New York, and predicted the sort of pandemic that we’re suffering from now.

My four decades at The Altamont Enterprise overlapped in large part with his four decades as the state’s wildlife pathologist. He always gave us straight answers, even on difficult questions.

Unlike most state agencies, where the principals won’t talk directly to reporters but rather rely on public information officers who often answer only “on background” if they answer at all, Ward Stone was accessible and direct.

In 2009, when the city of Albany got approval for a fifth expansion of its Rapp Road landfill, which lies partly in Guilderland and which many of our towns use, activists reviewed animal autopsy reports from Doc Stone’s Wildlife Pathology Unit, and found many animals were contaminated with Brodifacoum, a poison used to kill rats. Eight coyotes in the Pine Bush region had Brodifacoum in their systems, as did many great horned owls and a few hawks.

Brodifacoum, a rodenticide banned by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for household use because of its toxicity, was causing hemorrhaging and death in birds and mammals, Doc Stone told us. He also said that the insecticide Cyfluthrin targeting moths was used at the landfill, and could be poisoning the endangered Karner blue butterfly.

Albany had submitted to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation a $12 million plan to restore over 250 acres, meant to appease environmentalists.

Doc Stone, however, said some of the herbicides and pesticides approved for use in the restoration plan could actually be dangerous to insects, like the Karner blue butterfly, and to amphibians. Doc Stone also said that some of the land cited in the restoration plan would become capped landfill, and would not constitute restoration at all.

“I don’t like to see Brodifacoum anywhere,” Doc Stone told our reporter. Brodifacoum, he said, “moves easily among the food chain and is the worst of the rodenticides.” He thought it should be banned on a national level and said so.

New regulations should be drawn up to control use of pesticides, to solve problems that have been obvious for decades, Doc Stone said, commenting on animals from the Pine Bush that had rat poison in their systems.

The enforcement agency here of course was the DEC, Doc Stone’s boss. A DEC spokesman at the time told us of the city using pesticides, “As long as they use certified applicators, and follow the regulations, there is nothing the DEC can do about it.”

“It shouldn’t be there,” Doc Stone said of the dump. “It’s in a preserve.”

This is just one example that was typical of Doc Stone’s approach. He spoke out, sometimes bluntly, for what he believed was right.

Many times we called on him for practical advice and to provide context for our readers. When a woman was upset that Crossgates Mall wouldn’t answer her concerns over a bird she saw trapped in the mall, Doc Stone told us that, while the problem was widespread, it was not good for the bird, and was dangerous to humans because the birds often carry diseases and defecate in open areas.

He explained why poison wasn’t the answer and that the solution was prevention, to discover how the birds were entering.

Doc Stone provided context after an Altamont man said he shot a bobcat to protect his pets. “I’d say we’re darn lucky to have them,” said Doc Stone, of the higher population of bobcats in the eastern part of New York. Bobcats don’t pose any major threat to people, he said, and, since they eat small rodents, they keep those populations in check and, by doing so, help to reduce the spread of illnesses like Lymes disease. Bobcats will sometimes eat a pet, said Doc Stone, but “they’re not the threat that a coyote is to a dog or a cat.”

He kept our readers informed, too, of diseases in animals that could affect them. Doc Stone was the point person as rabies made its way north, finally arriving in Albany County with a rabid raccoon that a Knox farmer killed with a pitchfork.

Doc Stone told us how shocked he was to see a 70.3-pound female grass carp that was full of eggs. The fish was found at the Henry Hudson Park in the town of Bethlehem.

Grass carp are native to Siberia and northern China. “I was halted by its size,” Doc Stone said. “I looked at the chromosomes and it was diploid. It was shocking because the fish is supposed to be triploid, which means it’s not fertile. It was full of eggs. And that is not normal.”

The process for producing triploid fish involves shocking eggs with rapid change in temperature. The young are supposed to be tested before being sold. What was worrisome about the finding was that there could possibly be a male fish that was also fertile and spawning could be taking place.

Doc Stone also informed our readers when 28 deer in a week had tested positive for Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease in the Voorheesville area in the first confirmed instances of the virus in New York.

The disease primarily affects white-tailed deer and isn’t known to cause illness in humans, Stone assured us. EHD attacks the cells that make up the walls of blood vessels, he explained, and usually within a few days’ time, the affected deer will die from internal bleeding.

“You still can hunt, you still can eat deer meat,” said Doc Stone.

“There’s a warning here, too,” he said, “about global warming and its impact.”

And, as early as 2007, before white-nose syndrome even had a name, Doc Stone was examining the unusual number of bats that died that winter. “Somehow, they ran out of gas,” Doc Stone said of the bats running out of energy. When the bats used up their energy stores, they came out looking for food and got caught in the cold.

“That’s just a theory,” Doc Stone said, “This is a problem that needs a lot more research.”

Research was his forté.

As a boy growing up in Columbia County, he was schooled by nature. An only child, he spent hours in the fields and woods. “I was so interested in the trout and the stream and the wildlife,” he said in an Enterprise podcast in April 2020.

He spoke fondly of his two teachers, each in charge of four grades in the two-room Spencertown Academy. “The library used to come in a big box every year from the state library system,” Doc Stone said.

His teachers would order books especially for him “on Indians and animals and nature,” he said. He had a lifelong interest in Native Americans and proudly claimed Inuit heritage. Doc Stone’s son Jeremiah said that one of his father’s favorite boyhood authors was Thornton Burgess, a conservationist who wrote children’s stories based on his observations of nature. 

Doc Stone’s father, Ward Stone Sr., who had served in Manilla in field artillery during World War II, came home from the war with tuberculosis from which he never recovered. He was often away, seeking treatment but died when Doc Stone was 10 or 11.

“The day he passed away, my dad went to Punsit Creek, where his grandfather used to take him, to mourn his loss,” said Jeremiah Stone. Doc Stone escaped to nature when he lost his father — “the place he felt most himself,” said Jerimiah Stone.

Doc Stone kept letters his father had written to him and about him, proud that his son would go to college. First though, at age 17, Doc Stone joined the Coast Guard, stationed along the Hudson River, before transitioning to the Navy, becoming a Navy corpsman or medic.

That earned him the title “Doc,” said his daughter Montana Stone.

During his years in the Navy, Doc Stone said, he traveled to the Far East, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. He received many commendations, his son said, including one for autopsies he did of fallen airmen, determining their cause of death.

At age 21, he went to Syracuse University on a scholarship, where he was a standout on the debating team. He earned bachelor and master’s degrees in animal pathology and parasitology.

One of the through lines in Doc Stone’s life was finding answers to questions, solutions to problems.

His daughter Montana remembers, when she was about 10, asking her father about lead in jewelry. He sampled jewelry for lead in dozens of stores, she recalled, resulting in massive recalls and in a change to state regulations.

“He had an amazing global perspective,” she said, describing her father as both passionate and dedicated.

Doc Stone was particularly passionate about helping the Akwesasne Mohawks who live in northern New York State and Canada based along the St. Lawrence and Grasse rivers. “They were being badly polluted,” Doc Stone said. “So I was going to take a look at it. And they told me how the fish would have sores on them, how the mink were gone, and how the river had changed because of pollution.”

With almost no money, Doc Stone said, he enlisted bright, young members of the tribe — “smart, smart people,” he said — to do sampling.

“And sure enough, PCBs were everywhere and in their food chain … and nothing was being done,” recalled Doc Stone who went on to testify and write about the problems.

Montana Stone pointed to a United Nations Academic Impact report, “Keeping the ‘Turtle Island’ Alive — the Mohawk’s Fight Against Industrial Pollution,” that she wrote about the decades-long fight and notes that several of the interns have become doctors or scientists themselves.

“In the Mohawk community, young people’s blood still contains twice the national average of PCBs,” the report concludes. “Fish cannot be safely consumed. Cancer like lymphoma and melanoma is increasingly prevalent. Nevertheless, advocacy efforts by the Mohawk nation for the cleanup of PCB, with the help of the academic community, have limited the exposure of future generations to the remaining pollutants.”

Jeremiah Stone said his father was given an honorary name by the Mohawks, which translates as “He Who Cleanses the Earth.”

Another constant for Doc Stone was sharing his research through publication in both scientific journals and popular magazines and also through teaching — speaking at colleges, universities, and countless organizations — as well as educating newspaper readers.

Although he suffered a series of health crises, including five strokes and cancer, Doc Ward persevered.

In 2009, when he and Jeremiah, then 15, were hunting for ruffed grouse in Berne — “In all the time we’ve hunted, we’ve never taken an animal. We just like being in nature,” said Jeremiah — Doc Stone collapsed.

“All of a sudden, I didn’t have any legs,” recalled Doc Stone.

“He’s a prideful man. He wouldn’t let me pull him off the ground,” said Jeremiah. “Here he is, crawling through the snow.”

After a series of strokes and months hospitalized where he couldn’t speak or swallow, Doc Stone managed to get to his son’s final high school football game. “He stood up specifically for me and gave me the biggest hug ever,” said Jeremiah.

“Forced into retirement when he couldn’t speak for himself,” Montana Stone said, her father came to reside at Holiday Diamond Ridge, an independent living facility in Troy.

There, he taught a group on environmental issues and, with his son’s help, kept a garden, which he could see from his window. “I’m still a scientist,” he said. “I still want to do things and I want to make it a better, healthier Earth.”

“Even when his health was declining, he was always able to draw something from his small observations,” said his son.

Doc Stone also wrote many thought-provoking letters to me for our readers. He wrote about the ​ possibility of organisms that could be introduced from space and from Earth to space and the dangers that could pose. He wrote about the importance of the much-maligned coyote in ecology and the balance of nature. 

He wrote about the pandemic — which I’ve covered relentlessly for 153 weeks — in ways I’d never thought of. About how wild populations should be monitored for COVID mortality. About how, when it kills the elderly, it could kill culture. About the need to work together to solve a global problem like the pandemic. About how to cook venison properly to avoid COVID from deer. He also made a convincing case for vaccination and wrote, “​​ Getting the vaccination may well save lives including your own.”

What I liked best about getting these letters was when I called to confirm them. I would hear from Doc Stone what he had seen outside his window — like the changing plumage of the goldfinches — and what that meant in a larger context.

He has spent a lifetime concerned about things like the vast variety and volume of insects he’d observed in his childhood being killed off by pesticides and climate change. “That is the food that a lot of these bird species need, especially in springtime,” he said.

“We have sickened the heck out of the wildlife,” Doc Stone said. “And, as we make the world less suitable for wildlife, in my opinion we make it unsustainable for ourselves.”

“He went out swinging …,” said his son. “He wasn’t afraid to take on the bureaucracy and challenge those in power in pursuit of the truth.”

We hope, where you are now, the strawberries taste sweet, Doc Stone, and that the bugs and birds are plentiful — as we must make them here on Earth.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor