Born on July 10, 1893, in
Glasgow, Kentucky, Margaret Wood was raised on a ranch in the San Diego back country and was briefly a silent movie actress (1913–1917), working with
Hobart Bosworth,
Dustin Farnum,
Mack Sennett,
D.W. Griffith, and
Mabel Normand. She married ornithologist and oölogist Griffing Bancroft (son of historian
Hubert Howe Bancroft) in 1917. She was active in the social and political life of
San Diego County, with membership in the Red Cross, the Junior League, and the San Diego Society of Natural History. In 1930, she participated in a five-month journey to explore and document the bird and animal life of the Baja California coastline. The expedition included ornithologist
Adriaan Joseph van Rossem (California School of Technology), zoologist
Donald Ryder Dickey (California School of Technology), F. S. Rogers (
San Diego Natural History Museum), Albert Kroeckel, and J. Elton Green (University of California, Berkeley); Griffing Bancroft published a memoir of the journey in 1932,
The Flight of the Least Petrel. In 1935, Bancroft led a small expedition to search for the legendary lost mission of Santa Ysabel in the
Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, Baja California. She discovered cave symbols that contributed to the archaeological study of the migration of ancient Native American tribes. Bancroft traveled extensively on oölogical and archaeological expeditions to Baja California, Sonora, and the islands of the
Gulf of California. Interested in many areas of natural history, Bancroft collected snake specimens for the herpetologist
Laurence Klauber; in 1943, he named a new subspecies of
Sonora semiannulata after her,
Sonora bancroftae (San Telmo ground snake). From snake specimens Bancroft collected in 1932 on Isla San Geronimo, Baja California Norte, herpetologist Charles E. Shaw identified the species
Anniella geronimensis (1940). In 1971, Bancroft donated the Griffing Bancroft Library, with significant volumes on the history of the West, California, and Baja California, to the
University of California, San Diego. She died in
La Jolla, San Diego, California, on August 30, 1986. == Legacy ==