Charles Barney Cory (January 31, 1857 – July 31, 1921) was an American ornithologist and golfer.

Biography

Cory was born in Boston. His father had made a fortune from a large import business, ensuring that his son never had to work. At the age of sixteen Cory developed an interest in ornithology and began a skin collection. Due to his ability to travel anywhere he wished this soon became the best collection of birds of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico in existence.

Cory was a director in many corporations.

 He briefly attended Harvard and the Boston University School of Law but soon left to continue his travelling. In 1883 he was one of the forty-eight ornithologists invited to become Founders of the American Ornithologists' Union and one of those who attended the founding convention in New York. When Cory's collection of 19,000 bird specimens became too large to keep in his house he donated them to The Field Museum in Chicago, and he was given the position of Curator of Ornithology. Cory's collection of 600 ornithological volumes were purchased by Edward E. Ayer in 1894, and in turn donated to the museum. Cory lost his entire fortune in 1906, and took a salaried position at the museum as Curator of Zoology, remaining there for the rest of his life.

Cory wrote many books, including The Birds of Haiti and San Domingo (1885), The Birds of the West Indies (1889) and The Birds of Illinois andWisconsin (1909). His last major work was the four-part Catalogue of the Birds of the Americas, which was completed after his death by Carl Edward Hellmayr.

Cory was the first person to describe Cory's Shearwater as a species. It had previously been described by Giovanni Antonio Scopoli in 1769, but he had believed it to be a race of anothershearwater.

Cory participated in the 1904 Summer Olympics as a golfer. He competed in the individual event but did not finish.