21 Facts About Rollo Beck

Rollo Howard Beck was an American ornithologist, bird collector for museums, and explorer.

Rollo Beck was recognized for his extraordinary ability as a field worker by Robert Cushman Murphy as being "in a class by himself," and by University of California at Berkeley professor of zoology Frank Pitelka as "the field worker" of his generation.

Rollo Howard Beck was born in Los Gatos, California, and grew up in Berryessa working on apricot and prune orchards.

Rollo Beck completed only an 8th grade education, but took an early interest in natural history, trapping gophers after school on neighborhood farms.

Rollo Beck joined the American Ornithologists' Union in 1894, and was among the first members of the newly formed Cooper Ornithological Society which formed in San Jose, California.

Rollo Beck participated in early ornithological expeditions to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe with Holmes and Wilfred Hudson Osgood, and collected and helped describe the first eggs and nests of the western evening grosbeak and hermit warbler.

Rollo Beck visited the Channel Islands of, including Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel islands collecting and documenting birds as well as nests and eggs.

Rollo Beck was the first to collect and document the differences of the island scrub-jays that live on the Channel Islands, now recognized as distinct from mainland forms.

Later in 1897, while on his way back to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Rollo Beck was invited to join an ornithological expedition to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, organized by Frank Blake Webster and funded by Lionel Walter Rothschild, of Tring, England, later, and only after his father's death in 1915, Lord Rothschild.

Rollo Beck returned again to the Galapagos to collect more specimens around 1901, and he personally delivered these specimens to Walter Rothschild in Tring.

Back in San Francisco, Rollo Beck met with Leverett Mills Loomis, Director of the California Academy of Sciences.

Loomis was interested in seabirds, especially the Tubinares, now the Procellariiformes, and hired Rollo Beck to collect in Monterey Bay, the Channel Islands of California, and the Revillagigedo Islands of Mexico, while he waited for his Colombia permits.

Rollo Beck married his wife and lifelong companion, Ida Menzies of Berryessa, in 1907 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Rollo Beck went to work for Joseph Grinnell, the Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1908, and collected waterbirds for Grinnell's studies of California birds.

In 1920 Rollo Beck was contacted by Dr Sanford who proposed an extended South Pacific expedition.

Rollo Beck left the expedition in 1929, after sailing through the Pacific, from Tahiti to New Guinea to New Zealand and visiting hundreds of islands between.

Rollo and Ida Beck returned to California in 1929 with over 40,000 bird skins and a large anthropological collection.

Rollo and Ida Beck retired to the northern California town of Planada, near Merced, where they continued to study natural history and provide specimens of great scientific value.

Rollo Beck has been blamed for having collected a sample of Guadalupe caracaras in 1900 which were being exterminated by goat herders who viewed the bird as a predator.

Rollo Beck collected, as museum specimens, three of the last four individuals of the subspecies of Galapagos tortoise Geochelone nigra abingdonii, the Pinta Island tortoise.

Rollo Beck is commemorated in the scientific names of three taxa of reptiles.