Tim Gallagher

Tim Gallagher is an award-winning author, wildlife photographer, and magazine editor. He is the former editor-in-chief of LIVING BIRD, flagship publication of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Tim got his first field guide at the age of eight, and he’s been hooked on birds ever since. His lifelong interest in wilderness exploration has taken him twice to Greenland, where he made two open-boat voyages up the coast to study nesting seabirds and falcons, and to the hinterlands of Iceland, where he climbed lofty cliffs to learn more about the spectacular Gyrfalcon, the world’s largest falcon.

Gallagher also spent several years traveling across the South, interviewing people who claimed to have seen the legendary Ivory-billed Woodpecker and following up on their sightings. On one of these journeys down a bayou in eastern Arkansas, he and Bobby Harrison had a close-up view of an Ivory-bill. This sighting quickly led to the largest search ever launched to find a rare bird.

Gallagher went on the trail of the Imperial Woodpecker—a spectacular giant woodpecker (and closest relative of the Ivory-bill)—in the vast mesa pine forests of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental. The last documented sighting of the species took place in 1956, and yet rumors persist among mountain villagers that the birds may still live on in the remotest reaches of this mighty mountain range. To find out if the rumors could possibly be true, author Tim Gallagher set out on a harrowing journey through the high country of the Sierra Madre—a vast, lawless region and now the epicenter of illegal drug growing in Mexico—which he chronicled in his 2013 book, IMPERIAL DREAMS. He is also the author of PARTS UNKNOWN, THE GRAIL BIRD, FALCON FEVER, and WILD BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY.

Tim Gallagher's latest book is BORN TO FISH (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), about world-class angler and conservationist Greg Myerson.