Harry Swarth

Harry Schelwald Swarth (January 26, 1878 – October 22, 1935) was an American ornithologist.

Swarth was born in Chicago, Illinois; during his childhood, he was interested in birds and natural history. He began collecting birds in 1894 and attended Baptist College, Los Angeles after grammar school. In 1891, his family moved to Los Angeles.

In 1896, he joined the first extended natural history collecting expedition in Arizona. His 1914 A Distributed List of the Birds of Arizona is recognized as the first attempt to catalog all the birds of the state.

Swarth worked at the Field Museum of Natural History from 1905 to 1908, at the University of California Berkeley from 1908 to 1927, and at the California Academy of Sciences starting in 1927.

Swarth joined the Cooper Ornithological Club (now the Cooper Ornithological Society) in 1897 and remained a member until his death. He was a member of the American Ornithologists' Union and the British Ornithologists' Union. He died of a heart ailment at Berkeley, California on October 22, 1935.