Howe Elliott McClure, (April 29, 1910, Chicago-December 27, 1998, Camarillo, California) was an American entomologist, ornithologist and epidemiologist who worked on bird transmitted diseases in Asia, especially in Japan, Thailand and Malaya working on a number of diseases associated with birds including Japanese encephalitis. Life and work McClure was born in Chicago, Illinois and was the only child of Howe Alexander, a travelling salesman for a food company and Clara Phillips McClure, a gifted pianist. His early schooling was in a number of places including Lewisville, Texas where his mother moved after her divorce. He took an early interest in insects and read all the works of Jean Henri Fabre while still in his teens. He studied in Seattle, Washington; Lewisville, Texas; and Danville, Illinois (where his father lived with his step-mother). His masters work was in entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he studied under Clell Lee Metcalf. Apart from his regular research he conducted several unusual studies such as a 24-hour watch over a Tetraopes tetraopthalmus beetle, observing all the other insects that approached it and their interactions. He also studied ecology under Victor Ernest Shelford and graduated in June 1933 with high honors, Phi Beta Kappa. On 1 October 1933, he married Lucy Esther Lou Fairchild who he had known from childhood. Metcalf wrote to him that if he did not get a job, he should come back to school for another degree. This he did and was taken on by Metcalf but refused by W.P. Flint. For his master's degree he studied aerial insects. He then worked on a Ph.D. in wildlife management at Iowa State University with studies on the mourning dove. He also conducted studies on road-kills in Nebraska. He started bird banding in 1938 and personally banded close to 100,000 birds of 550 species by the end of his life, and may possibly hold the record for number of species ringed. After World War II, when McClure served in the U.S. Navy, he was hired by the State of California to study an outbreak of encephalitis in horses in Bakersfield. As a result of this work, Walter Reed Institutes of Research sent him on a mission to Japan in 1950. McClure went to Japan to study arthropod borne diseases. This work was supported by the US Army, 406 Medical General Laboratory. The work involved collecting bird blood samples for testing