Clarence Birdseye (December 9, 1886 – October 7, 1956) was an American inventor, entrepreneur, and naturalist, considered the founder of the modern frozen food industry. He founded the frozen food company Birds Eye. Among his inventions during his career was the double belt freezer. One of nine children, Birdseye grew up in Brooklyn before heading to Amherst College and began his scientific career with the U.S. government. A biography of his life was published by Doubleday over a half century after his death. Early life and education Clarence Birdseye was the sixth of nine children of Clarence Frank Birdseye, a lawyer in an insurance firm, and Ada Jane Underwood. His first years were spent in Brooklyn, New York, where his family owned a townhouse in Cobble Hill. From childhood, Birdseye was obsessed with natural science and with taxidermy, which he taught himself by correspondence. At the age of eleven he advertised his courses in the subject. When he was fourteen, the family moved to the suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, where Birdseye graduated from Montclair High School. He matriculated at Amherst College, where his father and elder brother had earned degrees. There he excelled at science, although an average student in other subjects. His obsession with collecting insects led his college classmates to nickname him "Bugs". In the summer after his freshman year, Birdseye worked for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in New Mexico and Arizona as an “assistant naturalist”, at a time when the agency was concerned with helping farmers and ranchers get rid of predators, chiefly coyotes. In 1908, family finances forced Birdseye to withdraw from college after his second year. In 1917, Birdseye's father and elder brother Kellogg went to prison for defrauding their employer; whether this was related to Birdseye's withdrawal from Amherst is unclear. Birdseye was once again hired by the USDA, this time for a project surveying animals in the American West. He also worked with entomologist Willard Van Orsdel King (1888–1970) in Montana, where, in 1910 and 1911, he captured several hundred small mammals from which King removed several thousand ticks for research, isolating them as the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a breakthrough. Birdseye's next field assignment, intermittently from 1912 to 1915, was in Labrador in the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada), where he became further interested in food preservation by freezing, especially fast freezing. He purchased