George Kruck Cherrie (
1865 –
1948) was an
American naturalist and
explorer.
Cherrie was born in
Iowa. He took part in about forty expeditions, mostly to
Central and
South America, including
Theodore Roosevelt's South American Expedition of 1913–1914, when Cherrie was collecting specimens for the
American Museum of Natural History. In 1915, he went to
Bolivia with the Alfred Collins-Garnet Day expedition.
Cherrie recounted his experiences in his memoir
Dark Trails: Adventures of a Naturalist (1930). He is commemorated in the names of a number of animals, including the
Cherrie's Tanager.
In 1927, the
Boy Scouts of America made Cherrie an
Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was give to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". The other eighteen men who were awarded this distinction were:
Roy Chapman Andrews; Robert Bartlett; Frederick Russell Burnham; Richard E. Byrd; James L. Clark;
Merian C. Cooper; Lincoln Ellsworth; Louis Agassiz Fuertes; George Bird Grinnell; Charles A. Lindbergh; Donald Baxter MacMillan; Clifford H. Pope;
George Palmer Putnam; Kermit Roosevelt; Carl Rungius;
Stewart Edward White; Orville Wright. *The Bird Collectors by Barbara and Richard Mearns ISBN 0-12-487440-1