On June 12, 1864, Frank Chapman was born in New Jersey, beginning a journey that would earn him the title of the Dean of American Ornithologists. As a self-taught scientist who spent most of his fifty-year career at the American Museum of Natural History, Chapman transformed the way the world studied birds. He authored twenty-three influential books on avian life and pioneered the use of camera photography in the field, moving the discipline away from shooting birds for specimen collections and toward observing them alive in their natural habitats.
Chapman’s most enduring contribution to environmental conservation came during the winter of 1900, when he launched the very first Christmas Bird Count to protest a traditional holiday hunt known as the Side Hunt. Instead of competing to see how many birds they could shoot, Chapman mobilized twenty-seven conservationists across North America to count living birds instead. This seasonal count has been held every single winter since its inception, evolving into the world’s longest-running citizen science project and providing vital population data to modern conservationists trying to protect vulnerable habitats.
