At the Annual Meeting and Dinner, Dr. John O’Neill will receive the Eisenmann Medal, the Linnaean Society’s highest award, given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur. Most of us know about the biological explorations of the Victorian era, with names such as Darwin and Wallace coming to mind when the topic is brought up. But biological exploration is not a thing of yesteryear; it is still very much a present-day endeavor! In the world of ornithology, one man astounded the world in 1964 with the discovery of a new genus of tanager in Peru that heralded a resurgence of interest in biological exploration in the Neotropics. That man is John O’Neill. Among his many explorations, in the late 1980’s Dr. O’Neill led an ornithological expedition to Peru’s Cordillera Divisor, an extremely remote and unexplored region deep in the Amazonian rain forest. That adventurous trip, chronicled in Don Stap’s 1990 book A Parrot Without a Name, culminated in the discovery of a parrot species that was new to science. Now with 15 species, including three new genera (Conioptilon mcilhennyi, Xenoglaux loweryi, and Wetmorethraupis sterrhopteron), described since he began his fieldwork in 1961 (the most recent published in 2017), Dr. O’Neill is renowned as someone who has an excellent eye for sites where new bird species may yet be found. He has largely worked in Peru, but his interests are far wider, including the avifauna of his home state of Texas. He is an accomplished bird artist, author, and has been instrumental in invigorating the field of ornithology through his example and his kindness.
