About Bill BILL HILTON JR. was twice named South Carolina Science Teacher of the Year and was honored as the state's Outstanding Biology Teacher. In December 2008 Discover magazine cited him as one of "50 Best Brains in Science" and one of ten top amateur scientists in America. In May 2013 he gave the commencement address at Newberry College and was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Science) for trend-setting work in environmental education, research, and conservation, and for life-long service to the College. In the 1970s Hilton was active in a Sierra Club campaign to make Congaree Swamp (South Carolina) a national park; he and one of his high school students testified before Congress in Washington DC in what ultimately was a successful effort. In 1998, The Charlotte Observer named Hilton a Carolinas Guardian of the Environment. In 2012 he was appointed an international Fellow of the Citizens Scientists League, and Newberry College--his undergraduate alma mater--honored Hilton as one of four charter members of its Hall of Master Teachers. In 2006 Hilton traveled to Japan as guest of Yamagata University, which awarded him the Prize for Excellence in an international competition for projects involving "Nature and Human Symbiosis."

Hilton taught high school and college biology for nearly 20 years before embarking on a career as science education consultant and natural history researcher. He helped launch the residential South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics in Hartsville, which he served as charter biology instructor and director of student research. During many summers he taught the nation's brightest young science minds as Natural Sciences Coordinator and Program Director at the National Youth Science Camp in Bartow WV, which he first attended as a South Carolina delegate upon graduation from high school.

Hilton is based near York, South Carolina, at Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History (www.hiltonpond.org), a 501(c)(3) non-profit research, education, and conservation organization he founded on family property in 1982 and has served since as Executive Director. An active field researcher, Hilton has banded more than 59,300 birds of 126 species during 31 years just at Hilton Pond. He is one of only about 150 people authorized to capture wild hummingbirds and has banded and released more than 4,700 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds at the Center since 1984, with more than 3,000 captured elsewhere.

Since 2004 Hilton has led groups of U.S., Canadian, and Costa Rican participants on 21 Neotropical hummingbird field expeditions--including 12 to Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, where he became the first researcher to systematically band and observe ruby-throats on their wintering grounds in the tropics; 798 RTHU have been banded in Guanacaste. He also led two expeditions to Ujarrás on Costa Rica's Caribbean slope to band another 93 RTHU where "they're not supposed to be." On solo trips he was the first scientist to band this species in El Salvador (2 RTHU) and Guatemala (62 RTHU), and led five hummingbird expeditions to Belize in 2010-13 (111 RTHU), to Guatemala in 2011 (4 more RTHU), and to band the first RTHU in Nicaragua in 2013 (15 banded); his ruby-throat banding total in Central America is now stands at 1,081--far more than the 46 that had been banded in Mexico and Cehtral America prior to his work. (Already scheduled are exciting new trips in Fall 2013 to Nicaragua & Guatemala.)

In September 1999 Hilton and the Center launched Operation RubyThroat: The Hummingbird Project, a cross-disciplinary initiative that builds international collaboration among students and teachers by using distribution and behavior of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, Archilochus colubris, as core topics. This award-winning project--for which Hilton is Principal Investigator--is described on its Web site, www.rubythroat.org. In the past decade Operation RubyThroat has received more than $450,000 in prestigious grants, donations, and in-kind support from the National Science Foundation, National Fish & Wildlife Foundation, ConocoPhillips Petroleum, The Christensen Fund, and other foundations, corporations, small businesses, and private individuals. The project is also affiliated with The GLOBE Program through which Hilton was involved in GLOBE ONE--a collaborative field campaign that trained Iowa teachers, students, and citizen scientists to study landscape-wide relationships between agricultural practices and the environment.

Hilton is author of The Piedmont Naturalist, a volume of essays that won a small press award; long out-of-print, it is now available as a downloadable e-Book for reading on portable devices such as Kindle, Nook, iPhone, IPad, and iPod, and on desktop computers. His writings have appeared in major newspapers; nationally distributed periodicals such as Bird Watcher's Digest, WildBird, The Chat, Senior Directions, and South Carolina Wildlife; Texas Birds Annual; in the Smithsonian's Bring Back the Birds (a primer on saving threatened species); and on various Internet Web sites. This Week at Hilton Pond, his on-going series of photo essays about nature phenomena in the Carolina Piedmont, has a large international following; more than 560 installments are permanently archived on-line. This Week consistently ranks in the top 20 natural history blogs out of more than 2,450 monitored internationally by Nature Blog Network. He also publishes his research results in peer-reviewed professional journals (see Selected Scientific & Education Publications). Hilton has been interviewed about nature topics by many newspapers and on U.S. and Canadian public and commercial radio and television broadcasts. He wrote and produced "Hawk Mountain Naturalist" for an Allentown PA public radio station and was writer/host for a popular Rock Hill SC-based TV series about nature happenings in the Carolina Piedmont.

In 1988 Hilton was awarded an Earthwatch Teaching Fellowship to help study Honeyeaters (Aves: Meliphagidae) on Kangaroo Island, Australia. In 1991 he received a Cooperative Fellowship through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct environmental education research for a nationwide program. He also collaborated with the National Research Council in developing national science standards and continues to work with states and school districts to align curricula with those standards. Hilton served as education director at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania and as director of education and research at Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden in North Carolina. He is past member of the board of directors of the Catawba Lands Conservancy, has been active as Conservation Chair with the local Sierra Club, and served on education committees of the National Council for Science and the Environment in Washington DC and for the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign.

Hilton has a Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) in Philosophy from Newberry College (1970), which he served in 2004-06 as president of the Alumni Association and as a member of the College's Board of Trustees. He originated and was chair of the highly successful international John Bachman Symposium, which recognized Newberry's founder during the College's 150th anniversary year (2006). Bachman (right), for whom Bachman's Warbler and Bachman's Sparrow are named, was a contemporary of John James Audubon and wrote all text for their three-volume Viviparous Quardupeds of North America. Hilton earned a Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) in Biology from Winthrop University (1977), through which he inventoried and studied ferns of York County SC. He has a Master of Science (M.S.) in Ecology & Behavioral Biology from University of Minnesota (1982), where he conducted a ground-breaking four-year field study of the behavioral ecology of Blue Jays, Cyanocitta cristata.

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