Jan Hamber

Jan Hamber ( Armstrong) is an American ornithologist and conservationist. While working at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in the 1970s, she became involved in the effort to save the California condor, and has been credited with playing a major role in the condor's survival in the wild. Hamber was the biologist who tracked the last known California condor in the wild, placing the phone call that led to its capture at the beginning of the successful captive breeding program that saved condors from becoming extinct.

Early life and education Jan Armstrong was born in New Jersey and grew up in New York City, where her father taught agriculture at a high school.

Conservation work While living in California, Hamber was one of the founders of the Santa Barbara chapter of the Audubon Society. She began volunteering at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in 1959, where by the end of the 1960s she had worked as associate curator of vertebrate zoology As a curator at the museum, Hamber was prevented from doing field research with the rest of the science team on one of California's Channel Islands, because the owner of the site would not allow a woman to work as a researcher there. As the condor captive breeding program began to work and more condors were born and released into the wild, Hamber again became involved in efforts to monitor them, The capture and release efforts proved to be effective, and by 2019 there were about 500 California condors in the world (split roughly equally between wild and captive birds A timeline of her work was exhibited by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in 2020. In 2012, Hamber was named a Local Hero by the Santa Barbara Independent. In 2017, Hamber was awarded the Trailblazing Women in Science Award from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, in recognition of her work on California condor conservation. Hamber also won the 2017 Wilderness Spirit Award from the Wildling Museum of Art & Nature and the Wilderness Legacy Award from Los Padres ForestWatch in 2014.

Selected awards Santa Barbara Local Hero (2012) Trailblazing Women in Science Award, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2017) Wilderness Spirit Award (2017)