C.U. Ornithologist Honored

Tim Gallagher, editor in chief of Cornell’s award-winning Living Bird magazine, has recently been named one of the 50 most influential Britons in America by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

“It was a complete shock. It’s almost only in Britain that they’ll put a bird watcher on the list,” laughed Gallagher, who works in the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

However, Gallagher is no ordinary bird watcher. He is one of the first people to see and identify the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a bird that was thought to be extinct in the 1940s. The 2004 rediscovery of the bird in Arkansas has raised public awareness of the conservation of Bottomland Hardwood Forests in the South, where the bird’s population has decreased by more than 80 percent in the last 200 years.