David H. Ellis

David Harry Ellis (born April 7, 1945 in Hayward , California ) is an American biologist , ecologist and conservationist . His main interests are the protection of birds of prey , ridgway quails and cranes .

Life

Ellis is the son of Harry Smith and Margaret Ellis, née Lowe. His father was involved in warship building . Before entering school, he lived in Utah and on a farm in Wyoming , where he observed his first birds of prey. During his school days, he spent winters in Denver , Colorado and summers on a farm near Steamboat Springs , Colorado. Excursions in the valleys and mountains of Colorado paved the way for a career as a researcher of endangered birds and birds of prey. He completed his undergraduate studies in Utah, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in Provo in 1969 . In December 1968 he married Catherine Hunt. From this marriage there were three children. A scholarship from the National Science Foundation studied at the University of Montana , where he in 1973 with a thesis Behavior of the Golden Eagle: to ontogenic study led by John Johnson Craighead for Ph.D. received his doctorate. In 1974 he became an ecologist in the Montana Department of Fish and Game and a senior biologist at the Arizona Field Station of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center . In 1977 he became head of research at the Institute for Raptor Studies in Oracle , Arizona.

His work in Patuxent initially focused on the ridgway quail ( Colinus virginianus ridgwayi ), a subspecies of the Virginia quail . The Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, which was founded in 1985 in southern Arizona, is a result of this work. In 1984 he published the conservation plan for this taxon on behalf of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service . He also studied the population development of the peregrine falcon in Arizona and the Kreyenborg falcon ( Falco kreyenborgi ) in Patagonia ( Argentina and Chile ). In the course of his research, the latter turned out to be a light morph of the South American peregrine falcon ( Falco peregrinus cassini ) and is therefore considered an invalid taxon.

In 1985 Patuxent offered him a position as a behavioral scientist in Maryland . During his ten-year research stay, he worked closely with NASA , which enabled him to study satellite telemetry on cranes in Canada , western and eastern Siberia and with eagles in Venezuela , Africa and Mongolia . In total, Ellis traveled to all states of the United States and 50 nations.

For his falcon studies in Asia he was recognized by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences with an academic status. He retired early to expose what he believed to be the corruption of various Arab and Arab-funded states in the buying and selling of birds of prey for use in the popular sport of falconry.

Ellis has published over 300 articles in a variety of journals, including Western Birds: Quarterly Journal of Western Field Ornithologists , Journal of Raptor Research , BioScience , Ambio , Ibis, and The Auk . He has also edited several books, including Cranes: Their Biology, Husbandry, and Conservation in 1996 , which was published in a Chinese translation in 2003, Wings across the desert: the incredible motorized crane migration (2001), Steamboat Springs (2009), das he and his wife wrote Enter the Realm of the Golden Eagle (2013) and Behavior of the Golden Eagle: an illustrated ethogram (2017).

literature

• Matthew C. Perry (Ed.): The Washington Biologists' Field Club: Its Members and its History (1900-2006 ). Washington Biologists' Field Club, Washington, DC 2007, ISBN 978-0-615-16259-1 , pp. 115-116

Web links

• Profile on the Global Raptor Research Network
• Literature by and about David H. Ellis in the WorldCat bibliographic database