Harry Schelwald Swarth was born on January 26, 1878, in Chicago, Illinois.

He was an American ornithologist. In 1891, his family moved to Los Angeles. During his childhood, he was interested in birds and natural history and began collecting birds in 1894. He attended Baptist College in Los Angeles. In 1896, he joined the first extended natural history collecting expedition to Arizona. His book “A Distributed List of the Birds of Arizona” (1914) is recognized as the first attempt to catalogue all the birds of the state. He became a member of the Cooper Ornithological Club (now the Cooper Ornithological Society) in 1897. Swarth worked as an Assistant in the Department of Zoology at the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, Illinois, from 1905 to 1908. In 1908, he returned to the West Coast to become an Assistant curator in Ornithology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California Berkeley. In 1927, he became Curator of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. In 1930, he was elected to attend the 7th Annual International Ornithological Congress, held in Amsterdam, Holland. This allowed him to visit England, where he was received at the British and Rothschild Museums and conducted research that enabled him to complete the Avifauna of the Galapagos Islands, published in 1931. In 1932, he led the scientific staff of the Templeton Crocker Expedition of the California Academy of Sciences to the Galapagos Islands. Swarth was a member of the American Ornithologists' Union and the British Ornithologists' Union. He published more than 150 books and pamphlets on zoology.

In 1910, he married Winifern Wood (1885–1960). He died on October 22, 1935, in Berkeley, California.

Robert Stuart Sward was born on June 23, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois.

He was an American and Canadian poet, novelist, and educator. He graduated from the University of Illinois (B.A.) and the University of Iowa (M.A.). He was appointed Visiting Poet at the University of Victoria, Department of Creative Writing, in 1969, where he first experimented with computer-generated poetry and served on the editorial board of Epoch. He also taught at Cornell University (1964-1965), the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Victoria, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1970, he founded the Soft Press publishing company in Victoria. In the 1980s, he worked for the CBC, where he interviewed and produced 60-minute radio features on Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, John Robert Colombo, Al Purdy, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and other leading Canadian figures. Sward also worked as a journalist, book reviewer, and feature writer for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Financial Times in Toronto while living on the Toronto Islands (1979-1985). He received a Canada Council grant to research and write “The Toronto Islands” (1983), a best-selling illustrated history of a unique community from prehistoric times to the present. A member of the League of Canadian Poets since 1975, Sward has toured Canada with each of his new books and reviewed and helped bring noted Canadian writers to the U.S. A Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. Sward is the author of 30 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including "Uncle Dog & Other Poems" (1962), "Kissing the Dancer" (1964), "Poems: New and Selected, 1957-1976", the novel "Jurassic Shales" (1975), "Poet Santa Cruz" (1985), "Three Dogs and a Parrot" (2001) and "God is in the Cracks, A Narrative in Voices" (2006). He has been published widely in numerous anthologies and traditional literary magazines, such as The New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, and The Hudson Review. In 2016, Sward was named Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, 2016–2018.

He died on February 21, 2022, in Santa Cruz, California.

Charles Anthony Swainson was born on May 29, 1820, in Liverpool, England.

He was an English theologian. He studied at the Royal Institution, Liverpool, and Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1841; M.A., 1844; D.D., 1864). He was ordained deacon in 1843 and priest in 1844. He served as Principal of Chichester Theological College (1854-1870), Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity (1864-1879) and Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (1879-1887). Swainson was Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (1881-1887) and a canon of Chichester (1863-1882). He also served as warden of St. Mary's Hospital in Chichester. His published works deal mainly with the Eastern liturgies and the creeds, e.g., "The Greek Liturgies Chiefly from Original Authorities" (1884).

In 1852, he married Elizabeth Inman (1829–1915). He died on September 15, 1887, in Cambridge, England.

Harry Swain has a PhD in economic geography from the University of Minnesota and a LLD from the University of Victoria. Between 1971 and 1995 he worked for nine federal government departments, including as the Deputy Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada. It was at this time that Swain became concerned with ensuring that the Canadian government kept its obligations to First Nations people and communities. During his tenure as Deputy Minister, Swain was involved in the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance in Quebec from July-September 1990. The Kanehsatà:ke Resistance (also known as the Oka crisis or the Mohawk Resistance at Kanesatake) was a land dispute between the town of Oka, Quebec, and the Mohawk reserves of Kanehsatake and Kahnawake. Mohawk protestors stood off against Canadian security forces to protest the expansion of a golf course and a condominium development. Swain worked closely with the disputing parties and played a key role in the negotiations. After retiring as Deputy Minister, Swain went on to become the director of Hambros and the CEO of its Canadian subsidiary. In 2005, after 22 years in the federal government, Swain moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he became affiliated with the University of Victoria. In 2010 he published, Oka: A Political Crisis and its Legacy.