In 1941 he bought a 178-acre swathe of tropical rain forest in Costa Rica that he named Finca Los Cusingos for the fiery-billed aracaris nesting all around. For the next 63 years he lived in a house he built himself, with no car and no telephone or electricity, simply watching the neotropical birds from dawn to dusk.
When Alexander Skutch died on his self-sufficient finca at San Isidro on May 12th, eight days from his 100th birthday, he left a legacy for the field of ornithology that experts said was paralleled only by that of the legendary John James Audubon.
Not that many know Skutch's name. When Jim Bonner, curator of birds at Pittsburgh's National Aviary, organised an exhibition in his honour in 1998, he described Skutch as "one of the most famous unknown men" in science.
His property, however, is now a public nature reserve managed by Costa Rica's Tropical Science Centre, available to international researchers, students, naturalists and bird-watchers in an area otherwise razed for agriculture.
And for laboratory-bound scientists and armchair adventurers and birders, Skutch's three dozen books detail the life histories of 300 avian species, along with colourful tales of his tangential coexistence with revolutions, earthquakes and deforestation.
It was Skutch who, by observing raucous brown jays in 1935, discovered what he called "helpers at the nest" and what ornithologists now label "co-operative brooding", the phenomenon of several adult birds working together to raise nesting babies. He considered the discovery, along with writing on the life histories of tropical birds, his finest work.
A Los Angeles Times reviewer praised the 1980 autobiographical A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm as "an old-school natural history of a kind that has almost disappeared among university types . . . a series of essays constructed with grace and great attention to detail".
Skutch started out observing far less lovely birds, common pigeons he made into pets at the Baltimore farmhouse where he grew up surrounded by nature and books. His fascination quickly turned him into a vegetarian. He was educated at the private Park School of Baltimore, and Johns Hopkins University, where he earned bachelor's and doctoral degrees in botany.
His first forays to the Central American tropics were to study banana plants for the United Fruit Company. But his gaze repeatedly rose from the microscope to the rufous-tailed hummingbird outside his window, building her nest and raising her brood.
When the young botanist returned to the US, he delved into ornithology, discovering that most neotropical avian species had been collected, named and described but that hardly anything was known about their habits.
A prolific writer of scientific papers and essays, he began publishing books in 1954 with the first of three volumes titled Life Histories of Central American Birds. Despite his 1956 The Quest of the Divine: An Inquiry into the Source and Goal of Morality and Religion, and the 1970 The Golden Core of Religion, Skutch's books primarily chronicled birds and his life watching them.
The scholar occasionally espoused iconoclastic theories, as in his 1985 book on evolution, Life Ascending, or The Minds of Birds in 1996, or his final book on biodiversity, in 2000, Harmony and Conflict in the Living World. He declared that birds think and feel emotion; condemned predatory species (he even shot snakes on his property that threatened birds); dismissed meat-eating as evil; and touted, not biodiversity, but biocompatibility in which species are conserved only if they aren't preying on each other.
He was married to Pamela Lankester from 1950 until her death in 2001, and they brought up an adopted son, Edwin.
Alexander Skutch: born May 20th, 1904; died May 12th, 2004