Many people know the story of how the famous fictional spy, James Bond, was named.  Author of the 007 spy series, Ian Fleming was an avid birder and spent much of his time on Jamaica. The only field guide to the birds of the Caribbean at the time was “Birds of the West Indies,” authored by an ornithologist named James Bond. Fleming, according to a letter he wrote to Bond’s wife, was searching for a name for his character that sounded ordinary but masculine. Seeing Bond’s book in front of him, he was struck that it was the perfect name. He went ahead and used the name. Only later did Fleming ask Bond if he was ok with it and so, James Bond the ornithologist, was saddled the rest of his life with this odd dual identity, at least in the minds of many people.

What these same people may not know is that the real James Bond had a strong connection to Maine. As a child he began visiting Mount Desert Island, with his uncle who was a well-known artist (Carroll Sargent Tyson) who created many works related to that area including even a series of 20 bird paintings packaged together as “The Birds of Mount Desert Island” in the 1930s. James Bond and his uncle were from Philadelphia but loved their summers in Maine; Bond’s wife wrote in one of her colorful biographical essays that James once confided to her that it was his summers in Maine that inspired him to become an ornithologist and spurred his interest in islands.

James and his wife, writer Mary Wickham Bond, continued to summer on Mount Desert Island throughout their lives, at a home near Pretty Marsh. James co-authored with his uncle and then authored several editions himself of a small book on the status of the birds of Mount Desert Island. Mary wrote newspaper columns for a time for the local Bar Harbor paper on their summer adventures on the island and collected some of them into a small book as well.

But James Bond is most well known as the person who most advanced understanding of the birds of the Caribbean through the decades, from about 1920 through the 1970s. He began visiting the islands as a twenty-year-old in the 1920s when it was possible to buy a cheap ticket on a ship traveling once a month from New York to Trinidad that allowed you to get off at any island along the way and get back on when the ship made its return to New York. Very little had been published about the birds of the Caribbean, so Bond was for the most part in uncharted ornithological territory, learning much at every visit.

Bond became affiliated with the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and began publishing his findings, as separate papers and eventually as the first annotated checklist of the birds of the West Indies. In the 1930s that was developed into the first guide to the birds of the West Indies, later adding in color illustrations to become closer to what we think of as today’s modern field guide. Among a long list of ornithological achievements, discoveries, and experiences, Bond was the person who made into a study skin the last undisputed Eskimo curlew. Someone on Barbados had shot it some months before (in 1963) and kept it in a freezer. When he arrived he identified it and prepared it into a specimen that was sent to the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Amazingly, Bond’s “Birds of the West Indies” served as the only field guide to Caribbean birds until 1998 when Herb Raffaele and others published a new version.

The real James Bond passed away in 1989 at the age of 89 but he should be remembered, along with his long list of accomplishments, as a part of Maine ornithological history.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” and the just-released “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.”