Awards and Grants

Douglas H. Pimlott Award
The Douglas H. Pimlott Award—Nature Canada’s most prestigious award—recognizes outstanding contributors to Canadian conservation.

George Archibald is the co-founder of The International Crane Foundation (ICF), an organization that works worldwide to conserve cranes, and the wetland and grassland ecosystems on which they depend.

Archibald was born and raised in Nova Scotia, where he bred waterfowl, pheasants and chickens at home. One of his earliest memories is of crawling after a female duck and her brood. Later, during his undergraduate years at Dalhousie University in Halifax, he spent two summers working as a bird caretaker at the Alberta Game Farm, where he was introduced to cranes and became captivated by their beauty.

Realizing that cranes were under intense pressure from the world’s rapidly expanding population, he and fellow Cornell University graduate student Ron Suey co-founded ICF in 1973 on a horse farm in Wisconsin. The Foundation continues to achieve tremendous conservation success for cranes in at least a dozen countries today.

Archibald has led captive breeding, migration assistance and habitat restoration programs around the world, including Russia, China, Japan, Thailand and Canada. He is perhaps best known for successfully breeding, through the use of artificial insemination, a human-imprinted Whooping Crane named Tex by imitating the courtship dancing and behavior of a male crane.