Frank M. Chapman

Frank Michler Chapman. [Born] 1864. Ornithologist.

A great scientist, he began his working career at sixteen in a bank. He made a fine success of it but his heart was not in it and thereafter without academic degrees, except an honorary doctorate of science awarded when he was forty-nine, he made himself a world authority on birds and bird life. He began his biography by saying, “This is the story of a boy and a man who believes that friendship with nature is one of the most wholesome and inspiring influences of life, and that birds are nature’s most vital and potent expressions.” Except for the years with the American Red Cross during the first World War, he devoted his life to the study of birds and bird life—at home, in the West Indies and in South America. The habitat bird groups in the American Museum of Natural History were the fruits of his ideas. Linnaean medalist of the Linnaean Society, Elliot medalist of the National Academy of Sciences, Medalist of the Burroughs Memorial Association and of the Roosevelt Memorial Association, author of scientific and popular works, honored by foreign colleagues, he lived a full and exciting and honored life—this man who began his ornithological studies as a boy by getting up early in the morning, observing birds in the New Jersey countryside and changing his bird clothes for his bank clothes in the old West Shore station at Englewood.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1945 Memorials