Frederick Charles Lincoln

Born in Denver on May 5, 1892, Frederick Charles Lincoln was an American ornithologist whose work helped make bird migration easier to study and understand. He became closely associated with the U.S. bird banding program, and his research connected thousands of banding records to larger patterns in how birds move across North America.

Lincoln is especially remembered for developing the flyway concept of migration and for the Lincoln index, a mark-and-recapture method described in 1930 for estimating animal populations. Those ideas gave scientists practical tools for tracking abundance and migration, and they remain part of the language of field biology today.

He died in Washington, D.C., on September 16, 1960. Though not a household name, his influence has lasted through the methods and migration frameworks that later researchers continued to use and build on.