Ted Parker

Theodore Albert "Ted" Parker III (April 1, 1953 – August 3, 1993) was an American ornithologist who specialized in the Neotropics. He "was widely considered the finest field birder / ornithologist that the world had ever seen."

Parker grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and became interested in birdwatching at an early age. In 1971 he broke the North American Big Year record (seeing more species of birds in a year than anyone before). In that year he enrolled at the University of Arizona and began to accompany ornithological expeditions to South America, particularly with Louisiana State University. He moved to Baton Rouge and was associated with LSU for the rest of his life (becoming a fanatical supporter of LSU basketball). He supported himself by leading birding tours, especially for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, until the last few years of his life, when he went to work for Conservation International.

According to Zimmer (1993), "Voice, microhabitat, and behavior are the keys [to identification] in neotropical forests, and Ted was not only the first to recognize this (his seminal paper on foliage-gleaner identification that appeared in the April 1979 issue of Continental Birdlife should be required reading for all students of tropical birding), but also honed his discrimination of these essential cues to a finer degree than anyone else." Zimmer adds that as knowledge of these matters was limited, "[m]any field problems… took weeks of patient effort for Ted to work out for himself."

If another ornithologist played Parker a tape of an unknown bird, he could usually recognize it and could often identify other species in the background noise. He might then, by his knowledge of bird ranges, state where the tape had been made—Zimmer gives the example of "south bank of the Amazon between the Rios Madeira and Tapajos".

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