Rollo Beck

Rollo Howard Beck

Rollo Howard Beck (born August 26, 1870 in Los Gatos , California , † November 22, 1950 in Planada , California) was an American animal collector and ornithologist.

Life

Before the end of eighth grade, Beck left school to learn the craft of grooming with Frank H. Holmes, a local farmer and amateur ornithologist . Initially, Beck collected birds to satisfy his own curiosity, but then became a professional collector working on behalf of the California Academy of Sciences , the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley , the American Museum of Natural History, and the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum ( now Natural History Museum) in Tring , England. At the age of 14 he prepared his first museum specimen, a subspecies of the Texas nightjar , which he had collected on June 30, 1885 in Berryessa , California. In 1894 Beck became a member of the American Ornithologists' Union and the Cooper Ornithological Club (now the Cooper Ornithological Society ), where he made contacts with other ornithologists in the United States and worldwide. Beck not only collected in the region of his hometown, but soon went on excursions to the Sierra Nevada and the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California . In 1897 Beck took part in the Webster-Harris expedition to the Galápagos Islands, which collected giant Galápagos tortoises on behalf of Walter Rothschild . From 1901 to 1902 he undertook his first own collecting expedition to the Galápagos. From 1905 to 1906 Beck collected seabirds along the Pacific coast of California and Mexico for the California Academy of Sciences and from 1907 to 1908 for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. On August 11, 1909, Beck married Ida May Menzies, who became his assistant on many expeditions. Ida Beck learned to collect birds and prepaper them herself. So they gathered for example, the type specimen of Guadalcanalhonigfressers ( Guadalcanaria inexpectata ), which is in the American Museum of Natural History.

Beck preparing a Galápagos giant tortoise

From 1920 to 1928 Beck was leader of the Whitney South Seas Expedition , a multi-year research trip (1920-1932), which was carried out on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. The expedition was initiated by Leonard C. Sanford and funded by Harry Payne Whitney , an English thoroughbred horse breeder and philanthropist. The France , a 75,000-ton schooner from Tahiti, served as the research ship . During this expedition Beck visited over 600 islands and islets and over 1000 locations. When Beck returned to California in 1929, the Whitney South Seas Expedition had collected over 40,000 bird hides .

Dedication names

By Rollo Beck following species and subspecies have been named: the wolf giant tortoise ( Chelonoidis becki ) becki Sceloporus , becki Sphaerodactylus , the Beck's Petrel ( Pseudobulweria becki ) Dicaeum aeneum becki (subspecies of the Bronze mistletoe eater ), Certhidea fusca becki (subspecies of Blindloedarwinfinks ) Meliphaga orientalis becki (subspecies of Slim beak honeyeater ) Petroica multicolor becki (subspecies of the South Sea Scharlachschnäppers ) phylloscopus poliocephalus becki (subspecies of Papua warbler ) Collocalia esculenta becki (subspecies of Glanzkopfsalangane ) Turdus poliocephalus becki (subspecies of the South Seas throttle ) Philoceanus becki and Epiplema becki .

literature

• Frank A. Pitelka: Rollo Beck - Old-school collector, member of an endangered species. American Birds 40 (3), 1986, pp. 385-387.
• John P. Dumbacher, Barbara West: Collecting Galápagos and the Pacific: How Rollo Beck shaped our understanding of evolution. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 4th Series, Vol. 61, Suppl. II, No. 13, 2010, pp. 211-243.
• Gary M. Fellers: Animal taxa named for Rollo H. Beck. Archives of Natural History 41 (1), 2014, pp. 113–123.
• Todd Starr Palmer: Biographies of Members of the American Ornithologists' Union , 1954, pp. 41-42 (based on the obituary by Todd Starr Palmer in the journal The Auk , Volume 68, Issue 2, 1951, p. 260)
• Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny, Bob Montgomerie: Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin , Princeton University Press 2014, pp. 80–82
• Matthias Wolff, Mark Gardener: The Role of Science for Conservation , Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2012, pp. 93–94
• William T. Everett: Rollo H. Beck's Visits to Isla Guadalupe, Mexico, with Additions and Corrections to the Island's Avifauna. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, Series 4, Volume 65, No. 7, May 2019, pp. 159-180

Web links

Commons : Rollo Howard Beck  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Rollo Beck biography