Pamela C. Rasmussen

She rediscovered the forest owlet Athene blewitti, which had not been seen since 1884, in western India, previous searches by S. Dillon Ripley, Salim Ali and others having failed because they relied on fake documentation from Richard Meinertzhagen.

Pamela Cecile Rasmussen (born October 16, 1959) is an American ornithologist and expert on Asian birds.

She was formerly a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and is based at the Michigan State University.

She is associated with other major centers of research in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Rasmussen's early research investigated South American seabirds and fossil birds from North America.

She later specialised in Asian birds describing several new species and clarifying the status of others, particularly white-eyes and owls.

More recently, she has been involved in large scale collaborations looking at patterns of global biodiversity, and has assessed the taxonomic status of South Asian vultures.

She was the main author of Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide, a landmark publication due to its greater geographical and species coverage compared to its predecessors.

As a result of her study of museum bird specimens when researching for the book, she was instrumental in unveiling the extent of the theft from museums and fraudulent documentation perpetrated by eminent British ornithologist Richard Meinertzhagen.

Pamela Rasmussen is the daughter of Helen Rasmussen, a Seventh-Day Adventist, whose husband, Chester Murray Rasmussen, a doctor, had left the family when Pamela and her sisters were young.

Her interest in birds started when her mother bought her the junior edition of Oliver Austin's Birds of the World, and Pamela subsequently always chose to receive bird books as presents.

She took her M.S. in 1983 at Walla Walla University, an Adventist-affiliated university in southeast Washington, and her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1990.

At Kansas, she studied blue-eyed shags, and was introduced to evolutionary theory, which had not been taught at her alma mater.

Rasmussen is a visiting assistant professor of zoology, and assistant museum curator of mammalogy and ornithology, at Michigan State University (MSU), having formerly been a research associate for the eminent American ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the American Ornithological Society (AOS) North American Classification Committee (NACC), a scientific associate with the bird group of the British Natural History Museum zoology section at Tring, and an associate editor of The Ibis, the scientific journal of the British Ornithologists' Union.

She is a scientific affiliate for the Field Museum of Natural History and the founder and editor of AVoCet, MSU's avian vocalizations center.

In November 1997, Rasmussen and Ben King of the American Museum of Natural History spent ten days unsuccessfully searching two east Indian locations before driving west to the site of another old specimen, where King spotted a small, chunky owl with short, heavily white-feathered legs and huge claws, which Rasmussen confirmed as the target species whilst the owl was videotaped and photographed.

With her colleagues, she clarified the taxonomy of Indonesian white-eyes, establishing the specific status of the Sangihe white-eye Zosterops nehrkorni and the Seram white-eye Z. stalkeri and confirmed the identity of the Serendib scops owl which had originally been discovered in Sri Lanka by local ornithologist Deepal Warakagoda.

The imperial pheasant is a rare bird found in the forests of Vietnam and Laos.

Rasmussen and her co-workers used morphology, hybridisation experiments, and DNA analysis to show that this pheasant, previously thought critically endangered, is actually a naturally occurring hybrid between the Vietnamese pheasant Lophura hatinhensis and the subspecies annamensis of the silver pheasant L. nycthemera.

all in 1998, and the Taiwan bush-warbler Bradypterus alishanensis in 2000.

In 2005, Rasmussen was part of a large multi-institutional collaboration investigating biodiversity hotspots, which have a prominent role in conservation.

The study assessed locations quantitatively for three criteria of bird diversity – species richness, the level of threat, and the number of endemic species.

The results demonstrated that hotspots did not show the same geographical distribution for each factor.

Only 2.5% of hotspot areas are common to all three aspects of diversity, with over 80% of hotspots registering on only one criterion.

Each criterion explained less than 24% of the variation in the other factors, suggesting that even within a single taxonomic class, different mechanisms are responsible for the origin and maintenance of various aspects of diversity.

Consequently, the different types of hotspots also vary greatly in their utility as conservation tools.

Rasmussen's recent work has concentrated on further large-scale collaborations with the same group of institutions studying global patterns in biodiversity.

A 2008 paper saw a return to white-eye taxonomy with the formal description of the Togian white-eye Zosterops somadikartai, an endemic species of the Togian Islands of Indonesia, which, unlike most of its relatives, lacks the white ring around the eye which give this group of birds its name.

Rasmussen noted that the Togian white-eye is distinctive not only in its appearance, but also in its lilting song, which sounds higher pitched and is less varied in frequency than the songs of its close relatives.

Pamela Rasmussen's interest in Asian birds led to her involvement in more specifically conservation-directed projects.

Two Gyps vultures, the Indian white-rumped vulture, Gyps bengalensis, and the "long-billed vulture" suffered a 99 percent population decrease in South Asia due to poisoning by diclofenac, a veterinary drug that causes kidney failure in birds that have eaten the carcasses of treated cattle.

Rasmussen showed that there are two distinct species of long-billed vulture: the Indian vulture G. indicus and slender-billed vulture G. tenuirostris.

This is important to conservation, since a captive-breeding program has been established to assist the recovery of at-risk vulture species.

In 2020 she replaced the ornithologist Frank Gill as an editor of the IOC World Bird List, an online list maintained on behalf of the International Ornithologists' Union.

Rasmussen is married to Michael D. Gottfried, who is Curator of Paleontology, Associate Professor of Geology, and Director of the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science at MSU.

Rasmussen's early work was largely focused on studies of the systematics, ecology and behaviour of Patagonian seabirds, notably cormorants.

She studied plumage variations in juvenile blue-eyed, king and red-legged cormorants, and used plumage and behavioural patterns to establish relationships between king and blue-eyed shags.

She also reviewed the fishing activity of olivaceous cormorants.

Rasmussen described four new Asian bird species from her study of museum specimens.

The Nicobar scops owl Otus alius, the Sangihe scops owl Otus collari, and the cinnabar hawk owl Ninox ios, a Sulawesi endemic,