William Eagle Clarke
Encyclopedia
Dr William Eagle Clarke I.S.O
Imperial Service Order
The Imperial Service Order was established by King Edward VII in August 1902. It was awarded on retirement to the administration and clerical staff of the Civil Service throughout the British Empire for long and meritorious service. Normally a person must have served for 25 years to become...

 LL.D.
(16 March 1853 - 10 May 1938) was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 ornithologist.

Clarke was born in Leeds
Leeds
Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...

 where his father William Clarke was a solicitor and educated at the Grammar School and at Yorkshire College, Leeds where he studied under Professor L C Miall. He was originally a civil engineer and surveyor, but later took up natural history
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

 as a profession. He became Curator of Leeds Museum in 1884, moving to the Natural History Department of the Royal Scottish Museum in 1888, where he was Keeper from 1906 to 1921.

He went on several expeditions including the Rhone Valley, Sclavonia, Hungary and Andorra. He observed that the Rhone Valley was important for migratory birds. He also worked on collections obtained by others and described the Negros Bleeding-heart
Negros Bleeding-heart
Negros Bleeding-heart is a species of pigeon endemic to the Philippines where it is found on the islands of Negros and Panay.This species has an extremely small, severely fragmented population...

. He was instrumental in recognizing that lighthouses and ships were capable of collecting a great deal of migration information. For his work on bird migration he became the first recipient of the Godman-Salvin Medal in 1922.
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