Winston E. Banko

Winston Edgar Banko (born May 22, 1920 in Spokane , Washington , † March 16, 2016 ), mostly Winston E. Banko in publications, was an American ornithologist and conservationist . His research interests were the trumpeter swan and the Hawaiian avifauna .

Life

Banko grew up in the Yakima Valley on the eastern foothills of the Cascade Range , where he developed an interest in bird watching from an early age . After graduating from Yakima High School in 1938, he enrolled at Oregon State University , where he became a member of the Phi Sigma Society in 1941 and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in wildlife management in 1943 . In the summers of 1941 and 1942 he worked as a fire watcher for the National Park Service on Mount Rainier . After three years in the US Navy during World War II, Banko worked from 1946 to 1947 as a wildlife biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Parks , where he mainly dealt with pheasants. From 1948 he worked for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service , where he was initially assistant administrator of the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Montana and was promoted to reserve manager in 1950. Until 1957 he was a manager in the Desert Game Range (now Desert National Wildlife Refuge ) in southern Nevada . After nine years of field and literary research, Banko wrote the monograph The Trumpeter Swan: Its History, Habits and Population in the United States , first published by the United States Department of the Interior as No. 63 in the North America Fauna Series in 1960 and by the publisher in 1980 University of Nebraska Press was reprinted. From 1959 to 1963, he was Section Leader, Wildlife Management, Game Reserves in the United States Fish and Wildlife Service office in Washington, DC From 1963 to 1965, Banko worked for the Home Office at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History , where he met Philip Strong Humphrey , the then curator of the Bird Department and director of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program. Its main task was to develop and implement a biological information search and retrieval system for about 25 local scientists who reported the results of field studies on various Central Pacific islands.

In 1965, Banko applied for a transfer to Hawaii and when he arrived in Honolulu he was the first US Wildlife Service biologist to study exclusively endangered bird species. With few resources, he built a basic library, founded a field station (now Kilauea Field Station, Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center, US Geological Survey / Biological Resources Division) and conducted extensive field studies of the way of life of selected endangered species, including the Hawaiian petrel and the Hawaiian crow . In August 1967, Banko succeeded in rediscovering the Maui sickle-clad bird ( Hemignathus affinis ) in the Kipahulu Valley , which was last detected in 1896. However, this species has been considered possibly extinct since the 1990s, as only one male was sighted in 1994.

In the early 1970s, Banko alerted the public to the decline of the Hawaiian crow and captured the first birds for a human care breeding program. After retiring in 1977, he collected over 15,600 records of the status and distribution of endemic Hawaiian birds with a grant from the National Park Service, and documented their historical decline in 14 technical reports.

With the support of his wife Connie and son Paul, Banko wrote extensive works on the Hawaiian bird bibliography and 7261 copies in museum collections over the next 15 years . More than 9800 Hawaiian birdwatching records from 1778 to 1975 were extracted from literature and contemporary reports and published from 1980 to 1990.

In 1999, Banko and his son co-wrote the entry on the Hawaiians and in 2002 co-wrote the entries on the Hawaiian Crow and the Palila in the Birds of North America encyclopedia .

literature

• About the Author (s) In: PG Rodewald (Ed.): Birds of North America , Version 3.0, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA
• 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. 72-73 ( researchgate.net ).

Web links

• Bibliography by Winston E. Banko at Researchgate
• Literature by and about Winston E. Banko in the WorldCat bibliographic database