Remembering Robert Payne Fox
By Dana Fox
October 24, 2025
For our birding friends –
Robert Payne Fox (Bob) of North Andover, MA passed away peacefully on October 15 at the age of 97 after a brief illness.
Bob’s interest in birds was sparked by earning his bird badge as an Eagle Scout. Throughout college his interest grew, and he was a very keen birder. He helped start the South Shore Bird Club, joined Mass Audubon and the American Birding Association.
While in the Air Force in Texas In April of 1953, he went over to the coast in Rockport frequently to help lead bird walks for Connie Hager’s B & B guests. He discovered a now extinct Eskimo Curlew near-by and showed it to many visitors that weekend. As a thank you, a group of birders from Houston invited him in June to join him on a birding trip. They took him to the Big Thicket to see the now extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker. A year later he was leading a trip in July to Western Mexico, high in the mountains above Mexico City, where he saw another now extinct species – the Imperial Woodpecker. Bob may you now fly with the Woodpeckers.
I first met Bob when I was 12 years old first through South Shore Bird Club trips and then the old Mass Audubon bus trips and campouts.
I went off to India right after College and thirty years later our strong bond was reestablished. From then on, we have enjoyed a life of birding together. Both of us were enamored with birding and had an unquenchable desire to share this passion. We led trips together, developed talks about our birding adventures and more recently about different families of birds, wrote about them, even developed a bird centric annual Birder’s Bash, focused on encouraging birders to come and see a winter crow roost and loons in the warm weather, monitoring Whip-poor-wills, spreading the word about Lake Umbagog and being active in Nuttall. Bob loved adding a component to our trips or talks on geology, his undergraduate degree. He always researched the evolutionary history of a species or family that we were talking about.
In the 90’s, he loved maintaining his life lists for countries and states that he had visited and reporting them each year to the American Birding Association. When we got together in the mid 90’s, he even insisted on organizing my life list and spent hours each January recounting all the species we had seen from his vast collection of checklists. This prompted me to acquire the AVISYS bird species database and more recently Scythebill another wonderful database. Getting yearly totals or trip details was now very easy. After retirement, we traveled the world to forty different countries in search of new species. Bob saw a total of 6,550 species in the world. He loved leading field trips and just couldn’t help himself from always trying to impart more knowledge to the participants – ever the educator.
We spent long summers at my off the grid summer camp in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire amongst the loons and Barred Owls.
He was a lifelong member and supporter of the South Shore Bird Club, Mass Audubon, and the American Birding Association. Bob co-authored with fellow Nuttall member, Allan Keith, the Birds of New Hampshire, a 100-year history of birds in that state. Bob and Allan received the Audubon Society of New Hampshire’s Goodhue-Elkins Award for contributions to New Hampshire Ornithology in 2014 For 65 years, he was also an active member of the Nuttall Ornithological Club. He was Secretary during the 100th anniversary of the Club and its torturous discussion if they would admit women. Just a few days ago, he was delighted in attending our late September William Brewster event and our October Club meeting.
Some details you might not know -
Robert Payne Fox (Bob) of North Andover passed away peacefully on October 15th at the age of 97 after a brief illness. Son of the late Arthur and Frances Fox of Wollaston, MA, he is survived by his wife, Dana Duxbury-Fox, and two sons, Robert P. Fox, Jr., of Cambridge, MA, and Timothy B. Fox and his wife, Laura, of Scituate MA. He is also survived by his stepson Craig Duxbury of Orlando, FL, and his granddaughter Mia.
A graduate of Harvard College Class of 1950, Bob later went on to earn several graduate degrees including an M.S. from Trinity University (San Antonio) and an Ed.D. from Boston University. He was a lifelong educator, beginning his career as a science teacher at North Quincy High School before becoming Principal of Atlantic Junior High School in Quincy, MA, and eventually becoming Superintendent of Schools in Hanover, MA, a position he held for over thirty years. While in that role, he was elected President of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), an organization he continued to be active in during his retirement. He was also President of the Massachusetts Superintendents Association.
Following college, Bob served as an officer of the United States Air Force from 1952-1954 and afterwards was in the Air Force Reserves until 1980 where he attained the rank of Colonel.
Bob’s other lifelong passion was as an avid gardener, with a home garden boasting an impressive variety of plants, notably rhododendrons and azaleas, from around the world. This interest in rhododendrons led him to the Massachusetts Rhododendron Society where he was President and helped organize two international conferences.
The consummate teacher, Bob, was involved in several summer camps in New Hampshire where he lent his organizational skills and love of nature to help develop generations of young people into caring adults.
A celebration of Bob’s life will be held sometime soon. In lieu of flowers, please send a donation in his name to either Mass Audubon or the American Birding Association.
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Includes excerpts from an obituary in the Boston Globe, October 20, 2025.