Robert Porter Allen

Robert Porter Allen’s interest in birds started early. He was a member of the Junior Audubon Society, and by 1930 was working for Audubon as a librarian, and in 1934 became the Society’s first sanctuary director. In 1939, he undertook foundational studies of the roseate spoonbill in Texas and Florida, documented in the monograph Spoonbill in 1942. In 1946, Allen started research on the whooping crane, consuming 27 months of fieldwork, including 6000 miles of travel by jeep and 20,000 miles of flight, spanning study sites in Texas at Aransas, and in Canada (Allen helped lead the 1954 expedition that discovered the summer nesting site in Wood Buffalo National Park). In addition to his time studying cranes in the field, Allen published widely about the bird for both a technical and general audience, including works such as A Complete Report of the Whooping Crane (1952) and On the Trail of Vanishing Birds (1957).