Richard C. McGregor

Richard Crittenden McGregor (24 February 1871 – 30 December 1936) was an Australian-American ornithologist and collector who specialised in the birds of the Philippines.

Biography

Richard Crittenden McGregor was born in Sydney, Australian on 24 February 1871. His father died when he was one year old. His mother, Charlotte Crittenden McGregor, was born in Rochester, New York, in 1841. The mother and son moved to California in the 1880s and then to Denver, Colorado where McGregor attended high school. He studied at Stanford University in Palo Alto, graduating in 1898 with a degree in philosophy, although he had originally studied zoology.

Before and during his studies, McGregor had a keen interest in birds. Along with fellow students at Stanford, he became a member of the fledgling Cooper Ornithological Club, where he contributed his skills in collecting eggs and skinning birds. He specialized in finches and conducted fieldwork in California, Colorado, Alaska, and Hawaii. He sold his collection of 2,500 bird skins, mostly finches, to Jonathan Dwight in 1913. The collection is now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

In 1901, McGregor traveled via Alaska to Manila, where he was employed by the American zoologist Dean Conant Worcester as a collector. He returned to California in late 1905 to conduct fish research, but in February 1906 he returned to Manila where he remained for the rest of his life. He initially served as a collector of natural history specimens for the Philippine Bureau of Science with which he had been involved since its founding in 1902. He became editor of The Philippine Journal of Science and later served as the head of the public relations department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.