Elisabeth Ann Bowles published a short sketch of Pearson’s years in Greensboro in her book A Good Beginning: The First Four Decades of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Chapel Hill, 1967):
T. GILBERT PEARSON, 1873–1943. A Quaker from Illinois, T. Gilbert Pearson wrote to President Lewis Lyndon Hobbs of Guilford College [in Greensboro] offering his collection of bird eggs and specimens as an initial payment on a college education. He further suggested that he might pay his expenses by developing the first ornithologic museum at a North Carolina college. Dr. Hobbs accepted the young man’s offer, and Pearson was graduated from Guilford College in 1897. In 1899 he earned a B.S. degree from the University of North Carolina [at Chapel Hill], which awarded him an honorary degree in 1924.
Pearson taught first at Guilford and then at the State Normal [now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. In the three years he spent at the Normal, he published his first book, Stories of Bird Life, made the study of biology more practical by field trips in Peabody Park, and organized the first Audubon Society in North Carolina, a project to which he was to devote the rest of his life.
From 1903 to 1910 Pearson was a secretary of the North Carolina Audubon Society and state game commissioner. With other ornithologists he organized the National Association of Audubon Societies in 1905 and served as secretary and executive officer from 1910 to 1920 and as president from 1920 to 1935.
Pearson’s autobiography, Adventures in Bird Protection, records his lifelong interest in ornithology. He was editor-in-chief of the three volume Birds of America, senior author of Birds of North Carolina, and co-editor of Book of Birds.