Christopher Filardi

Christopher Filardi is an American evolutionary biologist and ecologist.

Filardi, a 1989 graduate of Bowdoin College, earned his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Washington.

As a director at the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, Filardi was an author of The New York Timess Scientist at Work blog; writing about his work in the Solomon Islands.

Filardi and his team became the first to catch a male Moustached kingfisher (three females had been spotted in the past), using a mist net; in a controversial move, the team killed the bird to take him back for further study. The specimen was placed in a carefully maintained part of the museum dedicated to research alongside nearly a million other ornithological specimens. The group identified the Solomons frogmouth as a new genus of bird. The team documented the rapid evolution of the Zosteropidae (White-eye) bird into over a hundred species.

In 2014, Filardi co-authored a population study of grizzly bears that was able to use non-invasive methods in keeping with the cultural beliefs and practices of the Heiltsuk Nation to reveal the existence of a much larger population of bears that had been expected in a temperate forest on the central coast of British Columbia.