Philly’s own James Bond was an ornithologist who lived in Chestnut Hill

Everybody knows James Bond, the protagonist of history’s longest-running action-adventure movie franchise and one of the most famous fictional characters of all time.

But what about the lesser known James Bonds?

A new documentary, The Other Fellow — available now on all major video-on-demand channels — tells us there was one right here in Philadelphia. A famed ornithologist, James Bond was born in 1900 and lived in Chestnut Hill. He spent many years as a curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Ian Fleming named his 007 character after seeing the Philly Bond’s name on the cover of his book, Birds of the West Indies, which was first published in 1936.

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The Other Fellow is directed by Matthew Bauer, a longtime Bond fan from Australia. Having once been in a Facebook group with other men with the same name as him, Bauer sought out the many James Bonds, largely using social media.

In 1952, while working on his first 007 book, Casino Royale, Ian Fleming — an avid birder himself — happened to have a copy of Birds of the West Indies on hand. Looking for a name for his secret agent hero, and aiming for the “simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find,” he lifted the name from the cover of Bond’s birding book, as Fleming explained in a 1962 interview with the New Yorker.

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The Philadelphia James Bond wouldn’t hear about this until the 1960s, when the movies started to become popular. He and his wife were upset at first. As re-enacted in the documentary, Bond’s wife, Mary Wickham Bond, and Fleming exchanged letters.

“The problem was less the theft of the name, it’s more Fleming’s outing of the theft of the name,” Bauer said.

The Bonds went on, in 1964, to pay an unannounced visit to Fleming at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, not long before the author’s death. Fleming presented them with a copy of the first edition of You Only Live Twice, and signed it “To the real James Bond, from the thief of his identity.” The book sold for $84,000 in 2008.

Philly’s James Bond died in 1989, and is buried at the Church of the Messiah in Lower Gwynedd. While working on the film, Bauer came to Philadelphia, where he spent “a lovely 24 hours in Chestnut Hill.” He visited Bond’s old house and took time to study archives of his life.

The film is also aboutmany others named James Bond, and explores how being Bond has been a blessing and a curse, and sometimes both, for those who carry the name. We meet a man named James Bond who changed his name to something else, and a woman who changed her son’s name to James Bond, in order to help him blend in as they fled her abusive ex-husband.

The other Bonds featured in the film include a theater director, minister, a retired oilman, a lawyer, a doctor, a computer programmer, and even a man accused of murder.

Directing this film represented a logistical challenge for the Bauer, making it difficult to keep track of his contacts.

“In my phone, when you get to B, it starts to be kind of a crazy area.” But Bauer knows all the subjects as “James.”

“They’re all their own men to me,” he said.