William Earl Dodge Scott (April 22, 1852 – August 21, 1910) was an American ornithologist and naturalist.
While at Harvard, Scott befriended the young group of ornithologists, such as William Brewster, Henry Wetherbee Henshaw, Ruthven Deane, Daniel Chester French, Charles Johnson Maynard, and Henry Augustus Purdie, all of whom founded the first ornithological organization in the country, the Nuttall Ornithological Club.
In 1873, he graduated from Harvard, and in 1874, he went to the Penikese Island to study natural history at the Anderson School, which was founded by the recently deceased Louis Agassiz.
[1][2] After his schooling, Scott briefly headed West for a while, but ultimately returned to New York City and found work as a taxidermist until he was hired as acting curator of the museum of biology at Princeton University in 1875.
Throughout these years he made several collecting trips across the country and in Jamaica in search of bird specimen for the university.