American naturalist and explorer. Joseph Beal Steere was the son of Irish-Quaker pioneers, schoolteachers who took up farming in 1853 when Michigan was still the frontier. A local doctor, one of the first graduates of the University of Michigan, prepared him for university by tutoring him in classics. He moved to Ann Arbor in 1864 to commence his studies and earned his BA in 1868 and a law degree in 1870.

Rather than enter the bar however, he set out to see the world and pursue his interests in natural history, apparently on a mission from the university to test the hypotheses put forth in Darwin's Origin of Species. His travels were partly sponsored by his uncle's newspaper, The Peninsular Courier, which serialised his letters. From 1870-1873, he explored the Amazon valley, Peru, and Ecuador. He excavated Marajo burial mounds, recorded Amazon languages, and collected ethnographic, archaeological, and natural history specimens, including many previously unknown species of flora and fauna.

In 1873 he crossed the Pacific to China and Southeast Asia. He was the first Western visitor to Formosa (now Taiwan) and spent six months on the island collecting specimens and recording the language and customs of the aboriginal people. From 1874-1875, he collected in the Philippines and Indonesia. After five years of travel, he brought back about 20,000 zoological specimens and more than a thousand botanical specimens, as well as anthropological and ethnographic material. In recognition of his work, the University of Michigan awarded him an honorary doctorate and appointed him professor of zoology and curator of its natural history museum. He revisited the Amazon and Philippines with groups of students in the course of his professorship and, after resigning from the university in 1894, as a collector for the Smithsonian Institution.

He returned to farming but continued to write, not only on natural history but also on ethics and philosophy. His adventurous tales greatly influenced his grandson, William C. Steere, Director of the New York Botanical Garden (1958-1972), in his choice of career. Several bird species are named after him: Liocichla steerii Swinhoe, 1877 or Steere's Liocichla, Eurylaimus steerii Sharpe, 1876, the Mindanao broadbill, Centropus steerii Bourns & Worcester, 1894, the black-hooded coucal and Pitta steerii (Sharpe, 1876), the azure-breasted pitta.

Sources:
W.R. Buck, 1989, "William Campbell Steere (1907-1989)", Taxon, 38(3): 532-534
H. Crum, 1977, "William Campbell Steere: An Account of his Life and Work", The Bryologist, 80: 662.