John W. Fitzpatrick

John Weaver Fitzpatrick
John Fitzpatrick in conversation with Bangalore birdwatchers after a talk about bird conservation in January 2017
Born	1951
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	Ornithology, Conservation
Employer	Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Known for	Conservation of Florida Scrub Jay, eBird
Home town	Ithaca
Awards	Brewster Medal, Eisenmann Medal
Website	Message on Cornell Lab of Ornithology

John Weaver Fitzpatrick (17 September 1951 in Saint Paul, Minnesota) is an American ornithologist primarily known for his research work on the South American avifauna and for the conservation of the Florida scrub jay. He is currently the Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

In 1974, Fitzpatrick graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in biology. His early inspiration to work on Bird conservation came from a talk by John Terborgh and his travels in the summer of 1974 Manú National Park in south-eastern Peru. His summer in Peru made him change his plans from pursuing graduate study in University of California, Berkeley. In 1978, he earned a Ph.D. in biology from Princeton University for his study of the foraging behaviour of tyrant flycatchers in Manu.

After his PhD, he moved to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as its curator. In 1988, he left for Florida to take over as the executive director and senior research biologist at the Archbold Biological Station, a private ecological research foundation in central Florida. Much of his early research focused upon neotropical avifauna. He travelled many times to remote areas of South America, in particular to the western Amazonian basin and to the Andean foothills. In 1996, he published Neotropical Birds: Ecology and Conservation, a comprehensive synthesis of ecological information of the region covering 4037 species of birds from Mexico south to Tierra del Fuego. Along with other biologists, Fitzpatrick has described several species and sub-species new to science such as bar-winged wood wren,cinnamon screech owl,royal sunangel,Manu antbird, the cinnamon-breasted tody-tyrant, and the cinnamon-faced tyrannulet.