Why Woodpeckers are Scarce in the North
On the 18th of June 1858, one hundred and sixty years ago today, Darwin claims [1] to have received that fateful letter from Alfred Russel Wallace—probably the most famous letter …
Audubon’s Legendary Experiments
In his Ornithological Biography [1], John James Audubon describes two experiments that have become legends in the annals of ornithology. Both were ingenious ideas, but Audubon’s conclusions were misleading and …
A Whiskey-Jack by Any Other Name
The year I turned 21, I got my dream job: seasonal naturalist at Algonquin Provincial Park. Algonquin, established in 1893, was only the second provincial park to be created in …
The Spring Rivalry of Birds
Unless you have been living in a cave for the past couple of months, you will have been well aware of the spectacle of mature, powerful males posturing to one …
George Ord’s Warbler
I have always liked the Cape May Warbler. The male in spring is a handsome bird, but scarce enough here in eastern Ontario that I see only one or two …
Lumpers and Splitters
Almost everyone I know who is interested in birds has their favourite group, and the reasons for those favourites vary widely. For some, the difficulty—and their mastery—of field identification is …
The First Textbook of Ornithology?
Despite their association with school courses, and the ready availability of information online, textbooks have long been—and still are—useful for working ornithologists. The OED says that a textbook is : A …
Serendipity 101
The more I read about the history of ornithology, the more it strikes me how important serendipity—blind luck—has been to that history. Ernst Mayr’s career, for example, was a long …
A Bird’s Eye View
When I started my PhD at McGill University, in 1973, I was thrilled to discover that the university had a library devoted just to ornithology: the Blacker-Wood Library of Zoology …
The Utmost Harmony
I gave my first research talk at a ‘big’ international conference at the AOU meeting at Haverford College (Pennsylvania) in 1976. I talked about my work on Mexican hummingbirds and …