Raymond Andrew Paynter Jr. (29 November 1925 – 10 July 2003) was an American ornithologist and curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (1961–1999).
He then began to collect birds from Mexico and joined Yale University for his PhD with a thesis on the Ornithogeography of the Yucatan Peninsula.
His collecting career came to a bloody end in Ecuador in 1965, he and his wife Elizabeth Storer were attacked by a group of locals with machetes.
The USS Hope which was stationed off the coast of Ecuador had a crew of doctors who were able to help treating the Paynters.
He published books, monographs, gazetteers of South American birds and fifty research papers.