RIP Rudy Mancke

1945-2023

I know a lot of you reading this may not live in South Carolina, so the name Rudy Mancke (MANK-ee) won’t be familiar to you. But I can’t let his passing earlier this week go by without a tribute to this man who spent his career visiting nature, studying nature, appreciating nature, and sharing nature with others.

Anyone who listens to S.C. Public Radio, as I do whenever I’m driving in my truck, recognizes the gravelly voice of the host of “Nature Notes.” Accompanied by a gentle theme song of guitar riffs, “Nature Notes” aired every weekday. It was a one-minute snippet of natural science—delivered in Rudy’s folksy Southern drawl.

Photo by Robert Clark/Columbia Metropolitan magazine

Rudy invited listeners to e-mail him with questions and photos of things they found in their yards or the woods and could not identify. He always knew the answer and was happy to share. Bugs, snakes, birds, flowers, trees—anything in the natural world could be, and was, a subject of Rudy’s discerning eye. It was amazing how much eco-education he could pack into that brief minute. Sometimes he’d also read nature poetry on the air.

Here’s a recent example: Nature Notes. This one aired on the eve of Halloween, only a week before Rudy died. I had no idea he was ill, but I could hear the diminishment in his voice—and I wondered.

Rudy was the kind of old-school naturalist who had a knack for making the outdoors accessible and familiar to us amateurs. He had a deep background in science—a bachelor’s degree in biology and graduate work at the University of South Carolina, plus several honorary doctorates—but a lot of his knowledge of nature came from self-study. He became the first natural history curator of the S.C. State Museum and later was appointed the first (and only, so far) Naturalist-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina.

For 25 years, Rudy enjoyed his best-known gig: host of NatureScene, a beloved show on South Carolina Educational Television. Generations of SC-ETV viewers were turned on to the wonders of the natural world via NatureScene.

To close this short tribute, here are a couple of quotes from an article in Columbia Metropolitan magazine, which profiled him in 2021. This is Rudy Mancke at his best:

“Going for a walk in the woods is therapeutic. I realized that early in my life … I recognize the healing properties of being in nature, especially when the man-made world begins to feel overwhelming.”

And here is one of Rudy’s last Nature Notes, in which he muses on the necessity of death. It’s as if he knew his own end was coming. “Death is a part of life,” he says. “That’s not good, bad, right, or wrong.”