Harry LeGrand

Harry LeGrand is a founding member of the NCBP and has expertise in a wide range of taxa. He is lead author of the NCBP websites for birds, butterflies, dragonflies and damselflies, mammals, and vascular plants. He has also worked with Tom Howard to develop a number of checklists for groups that do not yet have a dedicated site, including crayfishes, freshwater bivalves, and marine fishes. Harry has had a hand in most of the NCBP websites, including the county mapping functions for amphibians and reptiles.

In Harry's profile picture, he is being visited by the rare Green Comma butterfly (Polygonia faunus), now known in only a handful of counties in the mountains. This is fitting, as the NCBP originally began with Harry and Tom Howard's list of North Carolina butterflies in the 1990s (see more about the history of the NCBP). Harry is interested in most of the animals found in our state, but has a particular passion for birds. He has also done a great deal of work with plants, and the extremely rare native plant Marshallia legrandii (Oak Barrens Barbara's-buttons) is named in his honor. Only formally described in 2012, the species was discovered in North Carolina by LeGrand in the 1980s, and is known from just a couple sites in North Carolina and Virginia.