Happy Birthday, 007!

(Sorry, can't find a picture of the man himself.)

Today is the birthday, in 1900, of the real James Bond. Wikipedia picks up the story:

The real Bond was born in Philadelphia and worked as an ornithologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in that city, rising to become curator of birds there. He was an expert in Caribbean birds and wrote the definitive book on the subject: Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936 and, in its fifth edition, still in print (ISBN 0-618-00210-3).

Ian Fleming, who was a keen bird watcher living in Jamaica, was familiar with Bond's book, and chose the name of its author for the hero of Casino Royale in 1953, apparently because he wanted a name that sounded 'as ordinary as possible'. Fleming wrote to the real Bond's wife, "It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born." In the twentieth James Bond film, Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan, playing the fictional Bond, can be seen examining the book Birds of the West Indies in an early scene that takes place in Havana, Cuba. Bond won the Institute of Jamaica's Musgrave Medal in 1952; the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists Union in 1954; and the Leidy Medal of the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1975.

He died in the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia at age 89.

I've known this story for many years now, but the recent release of the Casino Royale movie is a worthy occassion for its repetition. As to Fleming's choice of Bond as a model, I find it extremely amusing that both the original and the fictional character should share such a strong interest in, er, "birds."

UPDATE: Here's a memorial to Bond written by Kenneth C. Parkes, complete with photograph. It's a pdf. file, I'm afraid.