Biography
Bond was born in Philadelphia on January 4, 1900. His interest in natural history was spurred at an expedition his father, Francis E. Bond, undertook in 1911 to the Orinoco Delta. Bond was originally educated in Concord, New Hampshire, but after the death of his mother he moved with his father to England in 1914. There he studied at Harrow and later Cambridge University, where he obtained a B.A in 1922. After graduating he moved back to the United States and worked for a banking firm for three years in Philadelphia. An interest in natural history prompted him to quit and accept a place on an expedition to the Amazon run by the Academy of Natural Sciences. Subsequently he worked as an ornithologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in that city, rising to become curator of birds there. He was an expert in Caribbean birds and wrote the definitive book on the subject: Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936.
Bond won the Institute of Jamaica's Musgrave Medal in 1952; the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists Union in 1954; and the Leidy Medal of the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1975. He died in the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia at age 89. He is interred in the church yard at Church of the Messiah in Gwynedd Valley, PA.
Read more about this topic: James Bond (ornithologist)
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