| Activity | Museum Staff: 1888-1908 Assistant Curator, Department of Mammalogy and Ornithology, promoted to curator 1908, and became curator of birds 1920. He was made president of the Linnean Society of New York 1897, and was the first winner of their medal in 1912. President of the American Ornithologists' Union 1911. 1918 he received the Elliot medal of the National Academy of Sciences, which he was elected as a member of in 1921. From 1921 0 1925 he was president of the John Burroughs Memorial Association. In 1928 he was awarded the Roosevelt medal by the Roosevelt Memorial Association and in 1942 he retired from the American Museum of Natural History.
Although not a person who produced major theoretical contributions, Frank Chapman excelled in just about every other way a professional ornithologist of his time could. Not formally educated beyond high school, his consuming interest in the natural history of birds led to volunteer work and then to a permanent job at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Chapman rose to the leadership role in the Department of Birds there, and under his guidance its collections became the world's largest. He was also an imaginative display designer, pioneering the use of habitat group exhibits. Meanwhile, he was carrying out an active field program in Latin America, especially Panama and northwestern South America; this work led to, among other productions, major faunal monographs on the birds of Colombia and Ecuador. Many of these studies featured biogeographical analyses: Chapman was especially interested in life zones approaches and the interpretation of the role of barriers in influencing discontinuous distribution patterns. Last but not least, Chapman was the foremost popularizer of bird studies of his era, primarily through his numerous guidebooks, autobiographical field reminiscences, and his semi-popular journal Bird-Lore. |