Wells Cooke

Wells Woodbridge Cooke (25 January 1858 – 30 March 1916), was an American ornithologist who was called the “father of cooperative study of bird migration in America”.

He was born at Haydenville, Massachusetts and grew up largely in the lake region of eastern Wisconsin where he showed an early interest in natural history.

[3] In 1901 Cooke was appointed to a position in the Biological Survey section of the United States Department of Agriculture, based in Washington, D.C.

There, for the last 15 years of his life, he worked mainly on bird migration and distribution, building on the earlier records and network of participants he started in 1881.

[4] The ninety years of records that Cooke accumulated, along with those who followed him, are now held by the North American Bird Phenology Program.