A Very Queer Little Fish
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 …
Congratulations to This Year’s Student Membership Award Winners!
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 …
Thank You to Kathleen Erickson, Outgoing AOS Journals Director
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 …
Catherine Lindell Named Editor of The Condor: Ornithological Applications
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 …
Stresemann’s History of Ornithology
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 …
Red Eggs
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 …
Lives Lived
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 …
“An Egg Is Always an Adventure”
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 …
German Ornithological Treasures
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 …
Discovering Francis Willughby
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 …