Biographical Notes
Robert M. McClung was born on September 10, 1916, in Butler, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. He graduated from Butler Senior High School in 1934, and then attended the Northwood School, a boy's preparatory school near Lake Placid, New York, for one year, before enrolling at Princeton University. At Princeton he majored in biology and wrote a senior thesis on caddis flies. He graduated in 1939.

After college, McClung volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To support himself, he lived and worked at the Stuyvesant Neighborhood House, a center for neighborhood youth. He then worked briefly for an advertising agency. With America's entry into World War II imminent, McClung joined the V-7 program of the U.S. Naval Reserve in the summer of 1940. His duty included assignments to a number of Navy ships and flight training for carrier dive-bombers; he subsequently served on the carrier USS Kula Gulf as a Landing Signal Officer in the South Pacific. McClung was discharged in February 1946. He returned to his advertising job in New York but studied writing in the evenings at New York University. As a result of the contacts and progress made in those writing classes, McClung's first book, Wings in the Woods, was published by Morrow in 1948. The book reflected childhood experiences with nature on his family's farm.

In the fall of 1947, he began graduate work in zoology and natural history at Cornell University, hoping to work with zoo animals. During his graduate work, he published his second book. In 1948, he earned a master's degree in zoology. He then began work as an assistant in the animal department at the Bronx Zoo.

Shortly after returning to New York City, he met and married his wife, Gale Stubbs, a 1945 Mount Holyoke College graduate. McClung's career with the Bronx Zoo progressed, as did his writing, often based upon zoo animals.

From 1958 to 1962, McClung worked for National Geographic but decided to leave the Society in the interest of his own writing, which he was not permitted to undertake while working at National Geographic. He moved with his family, wife and sons Bill and Tom to Amherst, Mass. in 1962. For many years, McClung was active in local politics and conservation efforts.