Twenty years ago when I was writing The Red Canary—the story of how in the 1920s a bird enthusiast and a biology teacher created a red canary—I needed to include an overview of the history of canary domestication. To obtain the necessary information, I started to collect eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books on canary breeding. As …
Congratulations to the 2019 recipients of AOS’s Student Membership Awards! These awards provide one year of free membership to students who have not previously been members of the society. Winners, we hope you will take advantage of the many benefits of AOS membership and consider joining us at our annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, this June! Fernando Lòpez, National University …
Today the American Ornithological Society is saying a fond farewell to Kathleen Erickson, who has led AOS’s publications since 2013. Kathleen was hired in 2013 as the Managing Editor of The Auk and The Condor, working for the newly created Central Ornithological Publications Office, a joint venture of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the Cooper Ornithological Society that …
The American Ornithological Society announces the appointment of Catherine Lindell as the 15th Editor-in-Chief of The Condor: Ornithological Applications, one of two peer-reviewed journals published by AOS. Dr. Lindell is an Associate Professor of Integrative Biology at Michigan State University and an AOS Fellow. She will begin her position in 2019. The AOS Council selected Dr. Lindell to lead …
I suspect that rather few birders or ornithologists have heard of, or know much about, Erwin Stresemann. Among his many accomplishments Stresemann wrote the first and most comprehensive history of ornithology, published originally in German in 1951 (Die Entwicklung Der Ornithologie von Aristotles bis zur Gegenwart) and then (thankfully for me) in English in 1974 …
The cover or frontispiece of almost every book about birds’ eggs is adorned with a picture of a common guillemot (Common Murre [1]) egg. Why? There are several reasons—the common guillemot’s egg is an extraordinary shape, it’s brightly coloured, and the variation in the colour and maculation seems almost infinite. Egg collectors, or oölogists as …
Ornithologists are people too! When Bob Montgomerie, Jo Wimpenny and I wrote Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin (2014) our aim was to make the history of ornithology interesting, or at least more interesting than is usually the case, by focusing on the lives of ornithologists, with all their foibles, enthusiasms and idiosyncrasies. And what …
Birds’ eggs can bring out the worst in people. In the UK, for example, the avaricious collecting of birds’ eggs more than 60 years ago threatened or hastened local extinctions of rare raptors and the endangered red-backed shrike Lanius collurio, whose beautifully marked eggs seemed irresistible to collectors. Egg collecting, or öology as it was …
Johann Friederich Naumann (1780-1857) is probably the best known of the early German ornithologists, and was one of the founders of scientific ornithology in continental Europe. Naumann collected birds and their eggs, illustrated them, and wrote extensively about them — all while running the family farm and rearing his own brood of nine children. Naumann’s …
Francis Willughby (1635-1672), an English ornithologist, is far from well-known. He died at just 36, so his groundbreaking books on birds, fish and insects were all completed and subsequently published by his life-long friend and one-time undergraduate tutor, John Ray. A brilliant academic and prolific writer, Ray rather eclipsed Francis Willughby. When I wrote The …