You’ve been sent this article from the New York Times of 1910.
It’s a peculiar offer, yet, you liked the story of an amateur ornithologist of the turn of the last century, who by observation alone, presented the Thayer Theory.
After 25 years of research grounded on “description rather then observation” of Crows, gulls, warbles and swallows, Thayer pubished ‘Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern‘.
Thayer made public his findings first in a couple of articles in the Ornithological Journal, published by the Smithsonian Society in 1898.
Turn of the century stuff, when a man can claim:
‘[…] while protective coloring in animals is considered as belonging to the province of the zoologist, it properly belongs to the realm of pictorial art, and can be interpreted only by painters’
Well, from a point of view of someone like you, trying to put forward an environmental argument through an art forum, this is great stuff.
Using a quote like that as a ‘voxpop’ to be inserted in various contexts..
Yet what fascinates you is the person behind, who you’d like to investigate more.
Mr Abbot H. Thayer who, as an amateur, follow a passion and present it in official scientific forums..
Art and science, though wedded in the names of some colleges, are nevertheless commonly thought as two. Aristotle’s famous definition of art as a habit of production in conscious accordance with a correct method could double as a definition of science, certainly if a word of ‘investigation” were substituted with “production”
Thayer is now a major publishing and software developing company too, see here for deatails
