James Maxwell McConnell Fisher (1912-1970) was born in Bristol and educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1933 he was ornithologist on the Oxford University Expedition to Spitsbergen. From 1936-1939 he was assistant curator at the Zoological Society of London. During the Second World War, he studied rooks for the Ministry of Agriculture. Fisher helped to establish the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), of which he was honorary secretary from 1938 to 1944. He visited many islands inhabited by seabirds, and on 18 Sep 1955, he was lowered by helicopter onto Rockall in the North Atlantic, to formally take possession of the islet for the UK. From 1946 to 1954 he was natural history editor at Collins, where he was one of the founders of the 'New Naturalist' series.

Biographical history written with reference to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Who Was Who.