John E duPont, the multimillionaire (heir to the DuPont chemical fortune), the trained ornithologist who discovered and officially named more than a dozen new (sub)species of birds, collector of stamps, birds and shells, founder of the Delaware Museum of Natural History, the paranoid schizophrenic who was jailed after murdering an Olympic wrestler in 1996, died […]
Tag: ornithologist
Bearded ornithologists (2)
Theobald Johannes Krüper (1829-1921). German by birth. Connoisseur and collector of the avifauna of Greece and Turkey. Collected the Turkish nuthatch near Smyrna (Izmir) in 1862. August von Pelzeln (Vienna) described the species in his honor as Sitta. krueperi. Founder of the bird collection of the Museum of the University of Athens. Still going on […]
Bearded ornithologists (1)
Rudolf Zimmermann (1878-1943) founder of the Vereins Sächsischer Ornithologen (VSO), and eccentric self-taught ornithologist, early mentor ofErnst Mayr. Occupied a one-room apartment in Dresden full of books and periodicals. Cooked on an alcohol burner. Was always dressed for the outdoors. Smoked cigars constantly, died of throat cancer.
In Memoriam: James Bond
James Bond, the ornithologist whose name was purloined and bestowed upon a fictional spy, is more than 20 years gone. Bond’s life and work were celebrated in the monograph “In Memoriam: James Bond,” by Kenneth Parkes, Auk, vol. 106, October 1989, pp. 718-20. (Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)