He then found employment with United Fruit Company, which had a problem with banana diseases, for which it needed the expertise of a botanist.

Skutch collected plants for museums to make money, but observing birds remained his life's main focus.

[2][3] There, as an author of one of his obituaries wrote:[4] A lifelong vegetarian, Skutch grew corn, yucca and other crops, and, without running water until the 1990s, bathed and drank from the nearest stream.

With his wife Pamela, daughter of the English naturalist, botanist, and orchidologist Charles H. Lankester, whom he married in 1950, and their adopted son Edwin, he stayed there for the rest of his life.Skutch wrote over 40 books and over 200 papers on ornithology, preferring a descriptive style and eschewing statistics and even banding.

[4] He died eight days before his 100th birthday, in the same year that he received the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award.