2821 Ridge Rd
Highland Park, IL 60035
USA
Ornithologist and Illinois native Robert Ridgway – the first full-time curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution, co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union and primary author of the multi-volume The Birds of North and Middle America – helped transform amateur birdwatching into a rigorous science.
Storyteller Brian “Fox” Ellis traces Ridgway’s evolution from his teenage travels across the western wilderness in 1868 to his legacy of encouraging the next generation of conservationists. Ridgway was a student of Spencer Baird, who travelled with John James Audubon. He took birding trips to Central America and explored Alaska with John Burroughs, Louis Agassiz Fuertes and John Muir after Alaska was acquired from Russia. Ridgway helped to refine systematics and evolutionary theory, redefining the relationships between species, subspecies and geography.