Leroy Wilcox

Stephen LeRoy Wilcox (October 9, 1899 – August 13, 1978) was an American ornithologist and prolific bird bander.

Early life and education

LeRoy Wilcox was born in Speonk, a village in Southampton township, Suffolk County, New York. He attended Tanners Neck School, Westhampton, Westhampton Beach High School, and Cornell University, where, during the winter of 1919, he took a one-term poultry and game breeding course, studying under Arthur A. Allen, who had in 1916 established the first courses in ornithology and wildlife conservation in the United States.

Career

After an interval as proprietor of The Brushy Neck Pheasantry, where he bred ring neck pheasants and trap-nested single comb white leghorns, LeRoy Wilcox took over operations of the oldest commercial duck farm in the United States, the Oceanic Duck Farm, which had been founded in 1883 by his father Eugene O. Wilcox.

Wilcox became a bird bander in 1927 and spent more than 25 years studying piping plover (Charadrius melodus), producing the first detailed study of the bird and having more returns "than the combined total of all other banders." He was also specially interested in Osprey, Common Tern, Oystercatcher, and Willet, banding thousands of birds each year (with more than 132,000 in his lifetime He was responsible for a number of "firsts," sightings of rare birds in New York and the United States, and at least one "oldest." LeRoy Wilcox gave illustrated lectures on bird banding at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, at the Academy of Sciences, in Philadelphia, and at the United States National Museum, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere

Wilcox was a member of several scientific societies (the American Ornithological Union, the National Audubon Society, the Linnaean Society, the Eastern Bird Banding Association, the Wilson Ornithological Club, Yale's Lepidopterists’ Society, and the American Malacological Union, whose members appreciate mollusks) and collaborated widely with researchers attached to the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory in Eastport, Long Island, and with other ornithologists and members of the Linnaean Society. He banded nestlings on Gardiners Island, New York, for more than 20 years, and worked with other ornithologists to help to understand how DDT contributed to the decline of Ospreys in southern New England and on Long Island.

Wilcox's interests were not confined to birds; he studied botany, insects, fish, reptiles, and mammals.

Personal life LeRoy Wilcox married Georgianna Robinson in 1922. They had two daughters, Janice and Jean, and a son, David.