Robert Ridgway

Biography

Early life and family

Ridgway was born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, on July 2, 1850, to David and Henrietta (née Reed) Ridgway. He was the oldest of ten children. He was educated at common schools in his native town, where he showed a special fondness for natural history. This interest to explore nature, both shooting with a gun given to him by his father, as well as drawing from life, was encouraged by his parents, his uncle William, and his aunt Fannie Gunn.

In 1871 he met Julia Evelyn Perkins, the daughter of one of the engravers for The History of North American Birds. Ridgway's courtship of the girl who became known as "Evvie" lasted until she reached the age of eighteen, and they were married on October 12, 1875.

Ornithological training and the King expedition

In 1864, at the age of thirteen, the young Ridgway wrote to the Commissioner of Patents, seeking advice on the identification of a bird he had seen. He enclosed a full-sized color drawing of what turned out to be a pair of purple finches. His letter eventually was referred to Spencer Fullerton Baird of the Smithsonian Institution. Baird replied, identifying the bird and praising the boy's artistic abilities, yet cautioning him to learn and use the scientific names of birds in further correspondence.

The mentor and protégé continued their exchange of letters, which led to Ridgway's appointment, in the spring of 1867, as the naturalist on Clarence King's Survey of the 40th Parallel. After a brief, intensive stint of training in Washington, where he learned to prepare study skins, Ridgway joined the expedition in May. Starting from Sacramento, California, the team explored parts of Nevada, Utah Territory, and Idaho Territory. A highlight of the trip was a stop at Nevada's Pyramid Lake. In the fall of 1868, the members of the team were reduced for funding reasons, but Ridgway returned in 1869 for more work in Utah. In an undertaking that lasted nearly two years, Ridgway collected 1,522 bird-related specimens (753 nests and eggs and 769 skins) and served as a key member on one of the four great surveys of the American West. He observed 262 species, most of these on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. He had written most of his portion of King's report by 1872, but the "Ornithology" section was not published until 1877.

The Washington years

Upon his return to Washington, Ridgway illustrated and wrote for Baird and Thomas M. Brewer's History of North American Birds project. He formally joined the Smithsonian in 1874, under the supervision of curator George Brown Goode. In 1880 he received the job title of curator (variously, of ornithology or of the department of birds); he was titled Curator of Birds from 1886 until his death. Working with the institution's collection of approximately fifty thousand bird skins, Ridgway devoted himself to unraveling the taxonomic relationships among North American bird species. As well, he continued his field work to collect new specimens, making several trips to his home state of Illinois, Florida, other states of the U.S., and Costa Rica. The Smithsonian exchanged study skins with other museums, either by donation or loan, and provided material and publications to collectors such as José Castulo Zeledón of the Costa Rican National Museum in exchange for specimens.

Ridgway was articulate and literate, and served as the Smithsonian's mouthpiece and representative for many years in the study of birds. He welcomed visits to the museum from colleagues and the general public alike, and would give tours. One of his responsibilities involved assembling public exhibits. In the interest of accessibility, he made books available for browsing and displayed examples of birds described in popular natural histories. As well, he showed birds from well-known poetry, species like the nightingale that are not found in North America. Returning the favor that Baird had paid him, he responded to letters from the public to identify birds and provided artist's materials to a painter in California. Nevertheless, friends and colleagues described him as almost painfully shy, and he generally shirked publicity and the limelight.

Among Ridgway's colleagues at the Smithsonian was Pierre Louis Jouy, who provided an important collection of Asian birds in 1883. Charles Wallace Richmond joined the institution in 1893 (at first, as a night watchman) and was soon tasked by Ridgway with writing reviews and other short pieces. During Samuel Pierpont Langley's tenure as Secretary, Ridgway assisted Langley's aviation research. He provided calculations of the wing loading and other aerodynamic characteristics of species like the wandering albatross, turkey vulture, and other soaring birds.

In 1883, Robert Ridgway was a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) and he became an associate editor of the organization's journal The Auk. He was prevailed upon to serve as an officer of the organization, but on the condition that he not be required to preside at public meetings. He served as a vice president of the AOU (September 1883 – November 1891) and as its president (November 1898 – November 1900).

As scientific knowledge expanded quickly in the second half of the nineteenth century, the need for reorganizing the system of names used to describe North American birds grew commensurately. For example, certain names assigned by William Bartram in his catalog of 1791 were now deemed unusable. Robert Ridgway addressed this need with two publications in 1880 and 1881, while Elliott Coues published a competing checklist in 1882. Ridgway and Coues, along with Joel Asaph Allen, William Brewster, and Henry W. Henshaw, came together as a committee on nomenclature and classification, serving the newly founded AOU, to reconcile the various systems and catalogs. In 1886, the committee released The Code of Nomenclature and Check-List of North American Birds, both a consistent checklist and a set of rules for the naming of birds to be described in the future. The Code settled the disagreement about capitalization of species names and established today's order of presentation, with waterbirds first and passerines last. Several of the handbook's innovations were adopted by other branches of zoology, and were incorporated into the 1905 version of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

The committee's work served to standardize the way that birds are described, identifying them at the subspecies level and using a three-part trinomial name. While American ornithologists embraced the descriptive detail, European researchers of the time were reluctant to adopt it. Ridgway was an enthusiastic supporter of trinomial nomenclature, although his thinking in later life became more moderate.

Other affiliations

Robert Ridgway was a corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London; was associated with the Davenport (Iowa) Academy of Natural Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Brookville, Indiana, Society of Natural History, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences; and was a foreign member of the British Ornithologists' Union. He was a member of the permanent ornithological committee of the first international congress at Vienna in 1884. Ridgway was also honorary member of the Nuttall Ornithological Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for which he contributed illustrations and 48 articles to its Bulletin.

The short-lived Ridgway Ornithological Club of Chicago, Illinois (active from 1883 to about 1890), was named in Ridgway's honor, and he was an honorary member.

Although he lacked formal post-secondary education, Ridgway received an honorary master's degree in science from Indiana University in 1884, as a sign of gratitude for his supplying them with bird specimens after their museum burned down. He was listed with the title of Professor in Smithsonian annual reports and staff directories, despite his lack of a teaching appointment. He is sometimes referred to as "Dr. Ridgway," particularly by writers from his home state of Illinois. Ella Dean's profile is an example.

The Harriman expedition

In 1899, Robert Ridgway joined E. H. Harriman on his famous Harriman Alaska Expedition. John Muir, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, John Burroughs, Edward S. Curtis, and a number of other scientists and artists made a four-month expedition to study the flora and fauna of Alaska's coastline. However, the trip did not yield significant publications by Ridgway.

Other family members

Robert and Julia Ridgway had one son, Audubon Whelock Ridgway (May 15, 1877 – February 22, 1901). "Audie" had begun a promising career in ornithology at the Field Museum of Natural History when his life was cut short by a fatal bout of pneumonia.

Robert Ridgway's second-born brother, John Livzey Ridgway (February 28, 1859 – December 27, 1947), was a nationally prominent bird illustrator who worked for many years at the United States Geological Survey, as well as the Smithsonian, the California Institute of Technology, and the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art. The two brothers often collaborated on illustrations, sometimes with Robert doing the drawing and John the coloring.

Later life and death

In early June 1913, Robert Ridgway and his wife Julia ("Evvie") moved to Olney, Illinois, to reduce physical and mental stress so that he might complete The Birds of North and Middle America, of which five of eight parts had already appeared. They built a new house on 8 acres (3.2 hectares) that they had purchased in 1906, and named the place Larchmound for two large larch trees growing on the property. Ridgway also acquired a tract of 18 acres (7.3 hectares) located in the country, to be called Bird Haven, which he developed as a private nature reserve for birds and as a nursery for cultivation of non-native plants. His skill in landscaping and tending to the grounds was such that his expertise in that area was in some demand. Bird Haven, in part, is now an Olney city park.

Evvie's death on May 24, 1927, was a severe blow to Robert. Robert continued to live at Larchmound, tending to his beloved trees and shrubs, until his death on March 25, 1929, at the age of 78. Robert was buried at Bird Haven where Julia's ashes had been scattered.