The year that ended yesterday was an historic one for ornithology, with the first meeting of the newly formed American Ornithological Society (AOS) in East Lansing, Michigan. As a student of the history of ornithology, I know how hard it is to predict the future of our discipline (i.e. impossible), or to even guess correctly …
As this will be posted on Christmas day, I thought a post about my favourite Christmas song—and my second favourite song about birds [1]—would be in order. I particularly like The Twelve Days of Christmas because the words are secular, it originated in an 18th century memory game, the period celebrated is (or was) all …
If you grew up in the 1950s, as I did, you will know the remainder of that song title as “(is my two front teeth)”, a song recorded by Spike Jones & His City Slickers that I found really annoying back in the day [1]. Annoying at least until one day, on the way to …
In science, controversies often arise over complex issues when researchers approach a problem from different points of view, backgrounds, and philosophies—think, for example, of the debates over nature vs nurture, selection vs drift, group vs kin vs individual selection, gradualism vs punctuated equilibria, and mechanisms of sexual selection. As Ledyard Stebbins pointed out in 1982, …
Last Wednesday, 29 November, was the 390th anniversary of the birth of John Wray, exactly one week later than the birthday of his student, friend, collaborator, and benefactor Francis Willughby (on 22 November) who was 7 years younger. Wray changed his surname to Ray when he was 43 years old having decided then that that …
When I was a young teenager I spent my Saturday mornings during the school year at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). I was there to attend the weekly meeting of the Toronto Junior Field Naturalists’ Club, but often stayed afterward to explore the public galleries. I particularly loved the dioramas of birds and mammals as …
Yesterday (12 November) marked the anniversary of the discovery, in 1912, of the remains of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. The story of that expedition’s side-trip to collect Emperor Penguin eggs is well-known, celebrated in myriad books, articles, documentary films and exhibitions. As is often the case with scientific …
Where did the English names for birds come from (and where are they going)? I discussed a few weeks ago some of the onomatopoeic bird names (cuckoo, for example), but many of the common bird names currently in use derived from other sources indicating some aspect of the bird’s appearance, place of discovery, or habits …
Guest Post Karl Schulze-Hagen, Mönchengladbach, Germany The very first paper published in the Journal für Ornithologie, in 1853, was written by the Dresden zoologist Ludwig Reichenbach (1793-1879). That paper {On the concept of species in ornithology} [see footnote 1] is a bit long-winded and difficult to comprehend by today’s standards, but it is historically important …
While preparing a talk [1] last week about the early history of ornithology in North America, I wondered who might have been the first to describe and identify a bird on this continent. As far as I can tell, that was Jacques Cartier when he wrote, in 1534, about the ‘Apponat‘ (originally in French but …