GEORGE K. CHERRIE, FIELD NATURALIST 



ICbiTORlAij Note. — Mr. Clierrie is a veteran of the tropics. He has made twenty-seven faunistic ex- 

 peditions into tropical countries and has visited every state in South America except Chile. He began 

 his tropical field work in 18S9, when he went to Costa Rica under contract with the Costa Rica govern 

 ment to collect natural history specimens and to do taxidermy work for the little natural history museum 

 at San Jose. He soon became curator of birds and mammals there, and in connection with his work 

 headed many expeditions into the high mountainous interior of the country, as well as along both the 

 Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Costa Rica and Chiriqui. During the three years that he remained in 

 Costa Rica he brought together a collection of twelve thousand bird skins, many of which found their 

 way into American and European museums. 



Returning to tlie United States in 1892, Mr. Cherrie became assistant curator in charge of the depart- 

 ment of birds of the Field Museum of Chicago and immediately entered upon exploration work for that 

 institution. He went into the West Indies, particularly into Santo Domingo and Haiti, and also made 

 expedition into Florida, southern Texas and along the Gulf Coast. After three years' service with the Field 

 Museum, he took up field work in northern South America as a personal venture, and for some years 

 the results of his collecting and study went chiefly to the British Museum and the Rothschild Museum in 

 England. Most of this time was spent in Venezuela on the Orinoco and its tributaries. Some of his 

 most thrilling experiences with wild animals occurred during this stay in Venezuela, where also he 

 passed through many personal dangers in connection with native revolutions. 



He made later expeditions into the island of Trinidad, British Guiana, and French Guiana. Although 

 his greatest work has been on birds, he has studied and collected mammals and other forms in the field 

 as well. One gains an intimate knowledge of Mi . Cherrie through the pages of Colonel Roosevelt's 

 Through the Brazilian Wilderness, the story of an expedition on which Mr. Cherrie acted as naturalist. 

 With the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, we make the following quotations : 



"Cherrie was . . . born in Iowa, but [is] now a farmer in Vermont. He has a wife and six 

 children. Mrs. Cherrie had accompanied him during two or three years of their early married life 

 in his collecting trips along the Orinoco. Their second child was born when they were in camp a 

 couple of hundred miles from any white man or woman. . . . He was an unusually efficient and 

 fearless man ; and willy-nilly he had been forced at times to vary his career by taking part in insur- 

 f)/>o ( Pnntinuation on opposite page) 



