An obituary in the Los Angeles Times said his legacy in the field of ornithology was only "paralleled by that of the legendary John James Audubon."

He was the author of more than 25 books, including The Life of the Hummingbird, A Naturalist in Costa Rica, A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm, Nature Through Tropical Windows and the three-volume Life Histories of Central American Birds.

Jim Bonner, curator of birds at Pittsburgh's National Aviary, said that he was "one of the most famous unknown men" in science.

Skutch was born in Baltimore and reared at Pomona, his father's 180-acre farm off Reisterstown Road, which is now a shopping center.

It was here in the rolling fields and meadows of his youth, that Skutch pursued his love of birds and observed the pigeons his father had given him as a gift.

"Skutch reveled in all growing things and had a bird-feather collection," wrote James H. Bride in a Books and Authors profile in 1983 for The Sun. "Baltimore Orioles and Cape May warblers and other migrators wintered there."

Skutch, who was a 1921 graduate of the Park School, earned his undergraduate degree in 1925 from the Johns Hopkins University. After earning a doctorate in botany from JHU in 1928, he went to work in Central America for the United Fruit Co., studying banana plants.

But it was the rufous-tailed hummingbird he studied from his laboratory window that caught his attention. It was an experience that changed his life.

"To me, a hummingbird was, and is a fairylike bird," Skutch wrote years later, "with a tiny body of slender grace, that hovers, miraculously suspended between two broad sectors of misty light, like the separated halves of a halo, giving forth now and then a bright glint of green from its back, and sending out a low, murmurous humming from those wings vibrated into an unsubstantial haze, while it probes the depth of some bright corolla with a long and delicately slender bill."

In the early 1940s, he purchased Finca Los Cusingos, which he shared with his wife of 50 years, Pamela Lankester, until her death in 2001.

He built their home and spent the remainder of his life without a car, telephone, electricity or water. Until a gravity-fed waterline was installed in the 1970s, a nearby stream provided water for drinking, bathing and the weekly laundry. A vegetarian, he grew much of their food in a hillside garden.

"I have regarded it a duty to make available to others, in readable form, the results of my studies of nature. In these days when violence, in the human world and wider animal kingdom, receives so much publicity, I have tried to draw attention to the gentler, more endearing aspects of nature: parental devotion, cooperative breeding in birds, mutual aid, and the reciprocally beneficial interactions of animals and plants," Skutch told Contemporary Authors Online in a 2002 interview.

Skutch wrote eloquently of his life in A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm.

"Sometimes, when I stood watching the birds in one of these trees while the sun still hung low below the wooded ridge across the river, a flock of great scarlet macaws came from the east, as though riding down the level sunbeams.

"Two by two they flew, with steady, laborious wing beats, their long tails streaming like slender pennants behind their heavy bodies, their scarlet under plumage glowing vividly where touched by the horizontal rays."

In an undated questionnaire to Park School, Skutch wrote, "Contrary to popular belief, life in the more remote parts of the tropics is very quiet and peaceful and I have had almost no adventures which were exciting because of the danger involved in them.

"The people in those parts of Central America and Mexico which I have visited are quiet and law-abiding, wild beasts are almost invariably afraid of men, and the danger from snake-bites is far less than that of being injured in the traffic of any modern city."