[1] Charis Crockett persuaded her husband to become a photographer on a small expedition to New Guinea, where she would do anthropological research.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia sponsored the expedition, which had as members the newly married Crocketts and five other Americans.
[8] The expedition collected specimens of birds from the Kepuluan Penyu (Schildpad Islands),[9] Misool (Batanme), Salawati and Batanta.
Ripley, gave some of the survivors to the Bronx and Philadelphia Zoos, and sold the rest to Frank Buck and a number of dealers, at a profit of fifteen hundred dollars.
His rarer skins included those of a pair of Biak owls, Otus beccarii, of which there was only one previous specimen (a male taken in 1875 in Biak by an Italian ornithologist and deposited in the Natural History Museum in Genoa), and a variety of Samoan starling of which the Philadelphia Academy had only a single specimen (a broken-billed, bedraggled one collected a hundred years earlier by Titian R. Peale, the naturalist and painter).