At 95 the undisputed dean of American ornithologists, Chandler S. Robbins recently retired as Senior Scientist at the United States Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. In his sixty years with Patuxent, he conducted many important research projects, most notably on pesticides, forest fragmentation and neo-tropical migrants, his fieldwork on the last of these taking him to wide swaths of North, Central and South America. He was the senior author of the innovative and very popular Golden Guide Birds of North America: a Guide to Field Identification, the originator of the North American Breeding Bird Survey and the author of its protocols, still in effect after almost fifty years. He has received every major award in American ornithology, including the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Arthur A. Allen Award (1979), the American Birding Association’s Ludlow Griscom Award (1984), the American Ornithologists’ Union’s Elliott Coues Award (1997) and the Linnaean Society’s Eisenmann Medal (1987), given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur. He writes of his talk, “Having recently attended the Centennial meeting of the Brookline Bird Club at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, I have done much reflecting on the vast changes in human knowledge, in technology, in daily living, in bird populations, in wildlife habitats, and in environmental changes that affect all of the above. It has been my unique privilege to have known most of the century’s American ornithologists, to have given talks in 48 of the 50 states, and to have worked in one way or another (counting, tape recording, measuring, weighing, banding) with nearly all of North America’s breeding bird species. Our challenge for the future is to restore the close connection that our grandparents had with the natural environment so urban young people of the future can appreciate and protect the natural environment in which they live.”
