I did my PhD field work in Nayarit, Mexico, mainly in the coastal town of San Blas. On our first long drive there from Montreal, my fellow PhD student—Neil Brown—and I attempted to learn some basic Spanish, using a small Berlitz guide. Neil dropped me off just outside town, then headed off to his own …
Unpublished manuscript dated March 26th, 1918 by Lloyd Kerswill, King City, Ontario [1] It’s nearly the end of March and I have in front of me the first issues for 1918 of the world’s major ornithological journals—The Ibis, The Auk, The Condor, The Wilson Bulletin, The Emu, and Journal für Ornithologie. Even though there are …
When I was first starting to learn about birds, I was particularly intrigued (and delighted) with the peculiar names that had come from old English (dunlin, cormorant) and other languages (guillemot, eider), and those that were onomatopoeic (cuckoo, chickadeee). I also assumed that those birds named after people (Audubon’s Warbler, Temminck’s Stint, Townsend’s Warbler) were …
As you might suspect, I find the history of ornithology in particular—and the history of science in general—pretty interesting. But even I am not sure why. In high school, history was my least favourite subject, taught by Dr A. S. H. Hill—our only teacher with a PhD (and in Political Science)—who insisted on having us …
Guest Post by Ted Anderson Possibly the most influential ornithological paper published inNorth America in the 19th century was actually written by an invertebrate embryologist who was not even a member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The paper “The elimination of the unfit as illustrated by the introduced sparrow, Passer domesticus” was written by Professor …
26 February 2018 Mr Charles Darwin Westminster Abbey UK My Dear Charles My apologies for not writing last Monday as I had suggested I might when I wrote to you on your birthday. We were still on the Santa Cruz II ‘steaming’ from Floreana to Baltra on Monday morning and there was no way yo …
Mr Charles Darwin Westminster Abbey 20 Deans Yd Westminster London SW1P 3PA UK My Dear Charles (if I may) Happy 209th birthday! I know that a few people have written to you [1] in the 132 years since you shuffled off this mortal coil, but I thought it high time we brought you up to …
Probably my most memorable feast reflecting the title of this post is an ornithological lunch I had with Tim Birkhead at Restaurant Gilles-Simonet in St Girons in the French Pyrenées a few years ago. I had a superb Magret du Canard (the bird) with salad (the leaves) while Tim had the Tartine Pigonneau (pigeon sandwich) …
Before Google Scholar and similar search engines, most ornithologists that I know trundled off to the library from time to time to search the current literature on birds. As a graduate student at McGill, I was lucky enough to have the Blacker-Wood Library close at hand and they subscribed to something like 300 bird journals, …
For historians, travel to museums, libraries and historic sites is a way to get in touch with times past and seems, somehow, to improve understanding. I vividly remember the days I spent at Down House poring over Darwin’s artifacts, getting a feel for his working conditions, and supposing that somehow this made me a better …