Robert cushman murphy biography sample

The field work and collection of sea birds Murphy made during the voyage of the Daisy set his career in the direction it would follow for the rest of his life, firstly at the Brooklyn Museum and then at the American Museum of Natural History. Generous endowments from wealthy business men enabled the AMNH to charter vessels, keep professional collectors like Rollo Beck at sea and buy up the Rothschild and other collections when they came on the market, creating the foremost collection of sea birds in the world.

Murphy's expeditions to the guano islands of Peru and his many publications were crowned by his two volumes of The Oceanic Birds of South America , widely recognised as the founding work of sea bird science. Courtesy of The Auk - a quarterly journal of ornithology obituary January In , 58 years after the Daisy , Murphy returned to South Georgia and three years later died on 20 March When well over 70 he was in the Antarctic on the government icebreaker Glacier at the invitation of the National Science Foundation.

Robert cushman murphy biography sample

JSTOR Geographical Review. July April 29, - March 20, " PDF. The Auk. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 16 February Retrieved Resources J. Lazara 10 August Christopher Scharpf and Kenneth J. Retrieved 7 December Further reading [ edit ]. He received dozens of awards and notices worldwide, and was an officer of one type or another in hardly a smaller number of organizations and institutions.

Before Murphy's time the biogeography of marine birds had not been well understood many were simply viewed as vagrant populations , and his studies shed much new light in this direction. Life Chronology. After their wedding was advanced, the couple sailed to the Caribbean and then he set out to sea for more than a year. It was during this period that he wrote the notes that went into his book Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig Daisy, which gives an insight into life aboard the last of the whaling ships.

He took a special interest in marine birds. He lived for a period in Brooklyn where the couple had three children. They moved to Westchester County in He explored the marine birds on islands off Peru and wrote about them in Bird Islands of Peru