James Bond

James Bond was an American ornithologist and expert on the birds of the Caribbean, having written the definitive book on the subject: Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936. He served as a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. His name was appropriated by writer Ian Fleming for his fictional British spy of the same name; the real Bond enjoyed knowing his name was being used this way, and references to him permeate the resulting media franchise.

Bond was born on January 4, 1900 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Margaret Reeves (née Tyson) and Francis Edward Bond. His interest in natural history was spurred by an expedition his father undertook in 1911 to the Orinoco Delta. Bond was educated at the Delancey School followed by St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, but after the death of his mother he moved with his father to the United Kingdom in 1914. There, he studied at Harrow and later Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a B.A. in 1922 and was the sole American member of the Pitt Club.

After graduating he moved back to the United States and worked for a banking firm for three years in Philadelphia. An interest in natural history prompted him to quit, and along with Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee, took out a loan to set out on an expedition to the Amazon to collect specimens for the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Subsequently, he worked as an ornithologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, rising to become curator of ornithology there. He was an expert in Caribbean birds and wrote the definitive book on the subject: Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936. From the 1920s to the 1960s, he took dozens of birding explorations to the West Indies.

Bond won the Institute of Jamaica's Musgrave Medal in 1952; the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1954; and the Leidy Award of the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1975. He died on February 14, 1989 in the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia at age 89. He is interred in the church yard at Church of the Messiah in Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania.