Spencer Fullerton Baird - Eponymy

Naturalist, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied at Dickinson College, Carlisle, and in 1846 was appointed professor of natural history at Dickinson College, where he built up a vast collection of North American fauna. He published Catalogue of North American Mammals (1857) and Catalogue of North American Birds (1858), and was co-author of A History of North American Birds (1874–84). Baird's sandpiper and Baird's sparrow are named in his honour.

Spencer Fullerton Baird (February 3, 1823 – August 19, 1887) was an American ornithologist and ichthyologist.

Baird was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He graduated at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1840, and next year made an ornithological excursion through the mountains of Pennsylvania, walking, says one of his biographers, 400 miles in twenty-one days, and the last day 60 miles.

After studying medicine for a time, Baird became professor of natural history at Dickinson College in 1845, assuming also the duties of the chair of chemistry, and giving instruction in physiology and mathematics.

While an officer of the Smithsonian, Baird's duties included the superintendence of the labour of workers in widely different lines.

Of his own publications, the bibliography by George Brown Goode, from 1843 to the close of 1882, includes 1063 entries, of which 775 were short articles in his Annual Record. His most important volumes, on the whole, were Catalog of North American Reptiles (1853, with Charles Frédéric Girard), Birds, in the series of reports of explorations and surveys for a railway route from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean (1858), of which Dr Elliott Coues says that it exerted an influence perhaps stronger and more widely felt than that of any of its predecessors, Audubon's and Wilson's not excepted, and marked an epoch in the history of American ornithology ;

He died at the great marine biological laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, an institution which was largely the result of his own efforts, and which has exercised a wide effect upon both scientific and economic ichthyology.

Eponymy

The genus Bairdiella of drumfishes was named after him by Theodore Gill in 1861.

Species names after him include:

Baird's smooth-head, Alepocephalus bairdii Goode & Baird's Sparrow, Ammodramus bairdii (Audubon, 1844). Baird's Beaked Whale, Berardius bairdii Stejneger, 1883. Baird's Sandpiper, Calidris bairdii Coues, 1861. Mottled sculpin, Cottus bairdii Girard, 1850. Eunephrops bairdii S. Bumphead damselfish, Microspathodon bairdii (Gill, 1862). Marlin-spike grenadier, Nezumia bairdii (Goode & Baird's Trogon, Trogon bairdii Lawrence, 1868. Tanner Crab, Chionoecetes bairdi Rathbun, 1924 Peromyscus maniculatus bairdii